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Book Review
The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin. By Ann Uhry Abrams. (Boulder: Westview, 1999. xxii, 378 pp. $28.00, ISBN 0-8133-3497-7.)
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Every autumn, Americans celebrate "Thanksgiving," confident that they are participating in a ritual of national culture extending back to the beginnings of their collective history. Until the Disney Studios recently pitched a Powhatan princess as a box office heroine, however, icons of English settlement in the South seemed more peripheral to that culture. Ann Uhry Abrams explores why this is so, using as sources artwork and other cultural materials, mainly from the nineteenth century. Her book is not a highly theorized excursion into "new cultural history," but it is informed, incisive, and shaped by a deft sense that the curious cultural contests it describes mattered. |
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