Saltwater: Grief in Early America

Death is easy to locate in the archives of early America. Grief is not so easily pinned down. Yet it was a near constant companion for the men and women that settled in what is now New England. Their lives were a kaleidoscope of small-scale tragedies that suffused and colored everyday experiences. This pervasive suffering was exacerbated by unfamiliar environments and exposure to the anguish of Indigenous and Black Americans, unsettling well-worn frameworks to produce new dimensions of everyday grief. Mary Eyring traces these fleeting, often mundane, glimpses of grief in the archives--a note about a sailor maimed during a whaling voyage, the hint of a miscarriage in a court record, the suggestion of domestic violence within a tract on witchcraft, a house sent up in flames at the opening of a captivity narrative--to show how the cumulative weight of grief created a persistent mood that influenced public and private affairs in sweeping ways largely unexamined by previous scholars.With piercing insights and evocative prose, Eyring follows grief across generations and oceans to reveal a language of suffering understood and shared across diverse early American communities.

• | Author: Mary Eyring
• | Publisher: Omohundro Institute and Unc Press
• | Publication Date: Feb 18, 2025
• | Number of Pages: 00280 pages
• | Binding: Hardback or Cased Book
• | ISBN-10: 1469685388
• | ISBN-13: 9781469685380