This book is set in colonial Massachusetts where, in 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.

Looks at women from four Native American groups--the Puebloans, the Iroquois, the fur-trading tribes of the central Great Lakes region, the Cherokees--and explores the possibilities open to women and how colonization by Europeans changed their lives.

"The astonishing story of a unique missionary project--and the America it embodied--from award-winning historian John Demos. Near the start of the nineteenth century, as the newly established United States looked outward toward the wider world, a group of eminent Protestant ministers formed a grand scheme for gathering the rest of mankind into the redemptive fold of Christianity and 'civilization.' Its core element was a special school for 'heathen...