Roanoke. Manteo. Wanchese. Chicamacomico. These place names along today's Outer Banks are a testament to the Indigenous communities that thrived for generations along the Carolina coast. Though most sources for understanding these communities were written by European settlers who began to arrive in the late sixteenth century, those sources nevertheless offer a fascinating record of the region's Algonquian-speaking people. Here, drawing on decades of experience researching the ethnohistory of the coastal mid-Atlantic, Helen Rountree reconstructs the Indigenous world the Roanoke colonists encountered in the 1580s. Blending authoritative research with accessible narrative, Rountree reveals in rich detail the social, political, and religious lives of Native Americans before European colonization. Then narrating the story of the famed Lost Colony from the Indigenous vantage point, Rountree reconstructs what it may have been like for both sides as stranded English settlers sought to merge with existing local communities. Finally, drawing on the work of other scholars, Rountree brings the story of the Native people forward as far as possible toward the present. Featuring maps and original illustrations, Rountree offers a much needed introduction to the history and culture of the region's Native American people before, during, and after the founding of the Roanoke colony.

When the English first arrived at the Outer Banks in the summer of 1584, they were greeted by native Algonquian-speaking people who had long occupied present-day North Carolina. That historic contact initiated the often-turbulent period of early American history commonly known as the Roanoke Voyages. Unfortunately, contemporary accounts regularly mischaracterize or marginalize the Algonquins, and their significance in this period is poorly understood. This volume is a unique collection of narratives highlighting by name all of the Algonquians who played a role in the often-contentious attempts to establish the first permanent English colony in the New World. Starting with Manteo, the fascinating Croatoan Indian who traveled to England twice and learned to speak English, this book focuses on the identities and endeavors of each of these individual Algonquians and tells their stories.

Manteo embraces the northern part of Roanoke Island, the historic island inset from North Carolina's Outer Banks. It is best known as the site of Sir Walter Raleigh's first settlement in the New World. In the early 1800s, the town was a small, unnamed fishing village on Shallowbag Bay. Roughly 300 years after the colonists mysteriously disappeared, the town was named Manteo after the Native American who befriended the settlers and was baptized by them. The peaceful life enjoyed by islanders radically changed when they were overwhelmed by Union army troops, Confederate prisoners, and 3,000 former slaves who made up the Freedmen's Colony during the Civil War. In 1899, Manteo incorporated and became the commercial and governmental center of Dare County. National recognition came several decades later in 1937 with the production of Paul Green's outdoor drama The Lost Colony. Manteo has undergone many timely and creative renovations, including an ambitious project that culminated in 1984 with the celebration of our nation's 400th anniversary on the island where America first began.

Sicilian puppet theater was the predominant form of cultural expression for working-class southern Italians and Sicilians from the early 1800s until the proliferation of television in the 1950s. This form of dramatic prose theater also flourished in diasporic Italian urban communities, bringing immigrants together for nightly performances of the same deeply cherished chivalric stories. Agrippino Manteo’s scripts, examined for the first time in this study, are testimony to the rich substance of the Paladins of France narratives dramatized on the traditional opera dei pupi stage. Even beyond their historical and aesthetic value, the alternating episodes of love, enchantment, adventure, and warfare invite us to relive the passion, heartbreak, excitement, and magic of knights and damsels from around the globe – from Europe to North Africa to East Asia – who share the stage with a host of wizards, fairies, giants, and monsters. This study reconstructs the history of the Manteo family marionette theater in New York City across seven decades and three generations, provides translations of eight selected plays and 270 extant summaries, and offers comparative analyses uncovering the creative process of adaptation from Italian Renaissance masterpieces of chivalric poetry to nineteenth-century prose compilations to Agrippino Manteo’s opera dei pupi dramatizations.

"The world loves Sheriff Andy Taylor. Yet the actor who played him was intensely private. Here, for the first time, is the real Andy Griffith, his career and life defined by the island that made him in the years soon after World War II. He achieved his artistic breakthrough while acting in The Lost Colony drama on Roanoke Island, then spent the rest of his life repaying the island for giving him that start. Here, in unique closeup, is Andy of Manteo, reveling in wild, watery and loving ways with his fellow islanders." --Amazon.com