Podcast
Empire: World History
This book was very influential to William Dalrymple, who read it and was inspired to tell stories in a similar manner, using only primary sources and eyewitness accounts.
So that is John DeMoss' Unredeemed Captive, which was one of the most influential books for me that I ever read.
— Episode: 150. Worlds Colliding: Seizing Settlers...
Episode: 150. Worlds Colliding: Seizing Settlers in New Eng...
This book was very influential to William Dalrymple, who read it and was inspired to tell stories in a similar manner, using only primary sources and eyewitness accounts.
So that is John DeMoss' Unredeemed Captive, which was one of the most influential books for me that I ever read.
But what is so interesting about these captive narratives, which is what we're going to be talking about today from early America, is that they're both a very American story.
John DeMoss, whose entire life's work has been about this very early period of early Puritan and early English settlement of the American seaboard, came across this story and followed it, ransacking archives and reconstructing from all the different angles the story of the Reverend Williams, but particularly his daughter Eunice Williams.
And John Deimos in his analysis of this, you know, struggles to comprehend the killing of the children.
And Deimos in his book suggests that partly maybe the trauma of seeing her father helpless when the mother was killed, or his failure to be able to rescue her has left some sort of psychological inability of the daughter to trust her father again, because it's only when he dies that she'll come back.