"Why We Left reveals the dislocation, violence, and deforestation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, offering a powerful restorying of the journey to our present moment of precarity and rootlessness. Following American folk ballads back across the Atlantic, Joanna Brooks shares a scholarly and personal account of the intergenerational traumas that shape the history of white Anglos on Turtle Island"--
"Why We Left reveals the dislocation, violence, and deforestation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, offering a powerful restorying of the journey to our present moment of precarity and rootlessness. Following American folk ballads back across the Atlantic, Joanna Brooks shares a scholarly and personal account of the intergenerational traumas that shape the history of white Anglos on Turtle Island"--
Joanna Brooks is professor and chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. She is the author of the award-winning American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures as well as The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith.
Inhaltsangabe
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Brave Men Run
1. No Land of Opportunity: Folk Ballads and the Story of Why We Left
2. Murder the Brother Who Killed the Tree: Fratricide and the Story of Deforestation
3. Two Sisters and a Beaver Hat: Desire and the Story of Colonial Commodity Culture
4. To Sink It in the Lonesome Sea: Betrayal and the Story of Indentured Servitude
5. Seduction of the House Carpenter’s Wife: Abandonment and the Story of Colonial Migration