A band of Indians attacked Hatfield, Massachusetts, on September 19, 1677, burning, looting, and killing. They carried off seventeen people, mostly women and children. Their destination, on foot, was Canada. Among them were Martha Waite, pregnant, and her three girls, ages two, four, and six. Captives, 1677, the story of this first Indian/Canadian kidnapping, is a stirring novel of courageous survival, love, and rescue. It follows the captives terrible ordeal and the rescue mission of Marthas husband Benjamin Waite and his friend Stephen Jennings from Hatfield, to Count Frontenacs court in Quebec, and back to Massachusetts with the captives triumphal return. A forgotten saga of American heroism is brought to vivid life in Captives, 1677.

British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760 provides the first study of British captives in the North African Atlantic and Mediterranean, from the reign of Elizabeth I to George II. Based on extensive archival research in the United Kingdom, Nabil Matar furnishes the names of all captives while examining the problems that historians face in determining the numbers of early modern Britons in captivity. Matar also describes the roles which the monarchy, parliament, trading companies, and churches played (or did not play) in ransoming captives. He questions the emphasis on religious polarization in piracy and shows how much financial constraints, royal indifference, and corruption delayed the return of captives. As rivarly between Britain and France from 1688 on dominated the western Mediterranean and Atlantic, Matar concludes by showing how captives became the casus belli that justified European expansion.

The British and French in the Atlantic 1650-1800 provides a comprehensive history of this complex period and explores the contrasting worlds of the British and the French Empires as they strove to develop new societies in the Americas. Charting the volatile relationship between the British and French, this book examines the approaches that both empires took as they attempted to realise their ambitions of exploration, conquest and settlement, and highlights the similarities as well as the differences between them. Both empires faced slave revolts, internal rebellion and revolution as well as frequent wars against one another, which came to dominate the Atlantic world, and which culminated in the eventual failure of both empires in North America: the French following the Seven Years War in 1763 and the British twenty years later in the war against American Independence. Delving into key themes, such as exploration and settlement, the creation of societies, inequality and exploitation, conflict and violence, trade and slavery, and featuring a range of documents to enable a deeper insight into the relationship between the colonising Europeans and Native Americans, The British and French in the Atlantic 1650-1800 is ideal for students of the Atlantic World, early modern Britain and France, and colonial America.

This important new collection brings together ten of Alden Vaughan's essays about race relations in the British colonies. Focusing on the variable role of cultural and racial perceptions on colonial policies for Indians and African Americans, the essays include explorations of the origins of slavery and racism in Virginia, the causes of the Puritans' war against the Pequots, and the contest between natives and colonists to win the other's allegiance by persuasion or captivity. Less controversial but equally important to understanding the racial dynamics of early America are essays on early English paradigmatic views of Native Americans, the changing Anglo-American perceptions of Indian color and character, and frontier violence in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania. Published here for the first time are an extensive expos'e of slaveholder ideology in seventeenth-century Barbados, the second half of an essay on Puritan judicial policies for Indians, a general introduction, and headnotes to each essay. All previously published pieces have been revised to reflect recent scholarship or to address recent debates. Challenging standard interpretations while probing previously-ignored aspects of early American race relations, this convenient and provocative collection by one our most incisive commentators will be required reading for all scholars and students of early American history.