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Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 107; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaaa044

1945-2314

Jenny Hale Pulsipher,

Archaeology and Natural History

Karen Ordahl Kupperman has spent her career crafting finely detailed, judiciously argued, and well-written studies of seventeenth-century America and the Atlantic world. In Pocahontas and the English Boys she draws on her wealth of experience to engage a more general audience. Her title is a savvy one for that audience: Pocahontas is, with Sacagawea, one of two American Indian women familiar to almost every reader. Book reviews in the popular press appeared just as the book was released, demonstrating the subject's—and Kupperman's—wide appeal. While the book's title suggests it is biographical, the work goes well beyond the lives of Pocohontas and the English youth. It provides a history of early native and colonial Virginia through the lens of cultural intermediation. Intermediaries had to become fluent in the cultural and linguistic vocabularies of two societies, and the bicultural knowledge they gained made them suspect in both places. Were they loyal to their home communities, or had they “turn[ed] Turk?” (p. 176).