Abraham in Arms
Subtitle: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Early American Studies)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: September 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780812239652
Subjects: American history: c 1500 to c 1800; Gender studies; War & defence operations; c 1600 to c 1700; c 1700 to c 1800; New England; History - General History; History; History: American; Northeastern & North Atlantic states; Sex role; General; United States - Colonial Period; United States - State & Local - New England; History / United States / Colonial Period (1600-1775); United States - Revolutionary War; Frontier and pioneer life; Masculinity
Description: "In a reinterpretation of the years between 1620 and 1763, Ann M. Little reveals how ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways people in colonial New England, and their neighbors in New France and Indian Country, described their experiences in cross-cultural warfare. Little argues that English, French, and Indian people had broadly similar ideas about gender and authority. Because they understood both warfare and political power to be intertwined expressions of manhood, colonial warfare may be understood as a contest of different styles of masculinity.

For New England men, what had once been a masculinity based on household headship, Christian piety, and the duty to protect family and faith became one built around the more abstract notions of British nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for the Empire." "Based on archival research in both French and English sources, court records, captivity narratives, and the private correspondence of ministers and war officials, Abraham in Arms reconstructs colonial New England as a frontier borderland in which religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were permeable, fragile, and contested by Europeans and Indians alike."--Jacket.