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WORK TITLE: Americans Recaptured
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CITY: Canaan
STATE: VT
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https://www.amazon.com/Dr.-Molly-K.-Varley/e/B00OG1DR6S * http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00504?journalCode=tneq#.WI-7GhsrJPY
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PERSONAL
Married; children: yes.
EDUCATION:Warren Wilson College, B.A., 1999; University of Kent, M.A., 1999, 2001; University of Leeds, ESL certificate, 2000; University of Montana, Missoula, Ph.D, 2011; Drexel University, postbaccalaureate teaching certificate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Meredith College, Raleigh, NC, adjunct instructor, 2010-11; visiting assistant professor, 2011-13; Canaan schools, Canaan, VT, English teacher, 2015-. Has worked as substitute teacher and has taught English in China.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Molly K. Varley grew up in South Carolina and Kenya and went to several colleges, including Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina; University of Kent at Canterbury, England; and the University of Montana, Missoula. Her undergraduate degrees are in history and political science; she received a Ph.D. in American history and is ESL certified. She got married in England and shortly after moved to China, where she taught English. She has also taught at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. She now lives with her family in Canaan, Vermont, and teaches English in the Canaan schools.
Varley’s first book is Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity. During the Progressive era, around the turn of the twentieth century, Americans tried to justify their national development, in particular, the eradication of the Native American. By reprinting stories of white captives of native Americans, the stories became “the vital link between the frontier past and the modern future,” she writes in the book. By recycling these old accounts, people were able to take away any doubts about the path that was taken. Gender relations were also changing at that time and stories of white women captives were promoted to show women’s maternalism but also show the masculine values of independence, strength, and individuality they gained as captives.
Reviewers were positive in their assessment of Americans Recaptured. R.A. Shaddy in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries wrote: “The work is well organized, presenting its thematic elements … through a skillful discussion of the frontier narratives.” Sherry L. Smith in Journal of Southern History commented: “Historians have long understood that representations of Indians–or, in this case, their captives—reveal much more about the creators of those texts, images, and monuments than they do their subjects. By zeroing in on a particularly unsettled period in American history, Varley finds that some Anglo-Americans turned to captivity narratives to assure themselves that the frontier ‘creation story’ continued to inform nation-building as the United States adjusted to new realities, especially the waves of immigrants who supposedly threatened to upend it.” Smith added: “Varley’s evidence, which comes completely from east of the Mississippi River, is convincing regarding a segment of the nation. The attention paid to monument building contributes to the genre of memory studies and adds a welcome eastern Native American element to that literature.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, August, 2015, R.A. Shaddy, review of Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity, p. 2087.
Journal of Southern History, 2016, Sherry L. Smith, review of Americans Recaptured, p. 707.
ONLINE
Molly Varley LinkedIn Page, https://www.linkedin.com/in/molly-varley-220aa232 (April 5, 2017).
Molly Varley grew up in South Carolina and Kenya, and went to college at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC; University of Kent at Canterbury, UK; and the University of Montana, Missoula. After getting married in England, Molly taught English in China, and has taught at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. Since publication, she has moved with her family to Canaan, Vermont. This is her first book.
QUOTED: Historians have long understood that representations of Indians--or, in this case, their captives--reveal much more about the creators of those texts, images, and monuments than they do their subjects. By zeroing in on a particularly unsettled period in American history, Varley finds that some Anglo-Americans turned to captivity narratives to assure themselves that the frontier "creation story" continued to inform nation-building as the United States adjusted to new realities, especially the waves of immigrants who supposedly threatened to upend it
Varley's evidence, which comes completely from east of the Mississippi River, is convincing regarding a segment of the nation. The attention paid to monument building contributes to the genre of memory studies and adds a welcome eastern Native American element to that literature.
Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity
Sherry L. Smith
Journal of Southern History. 82.3 (Aug. 2016): p707.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity. By Molly K. Varley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. [x], 230. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4493-1.)
This book by Molly K. Varley argues that some Progressive-era people used eighteenth- and nineteenth-century captivity narratives for their own purposes. They often did so by publishing new editions of old texts and constructing monuments like statues and other kinds of physical memorials in public places. Building on Frederick Jackson Turner's theory that the frontier experience molded American identity, this generation of Americans embraced white captives who lived among Indians as the perfect symbols representing the best of both the frontier and the Native worlds. By resurrecting these stories, Progressives hoped to project the past onto the future, perpetuating a national collective identity while alleviating any doubts about the morality of conquest. Captives' experiences, they believed, "embodied the Turnerian process" by which European immigrants became Americans (p. 179). Meanwhile, the suffering those captives endured helped justify Indian extinction.
Memorializing white captives served other purposes as well. It valorized rural, small-town America at a time of rapid urbanization and helped blend conservation of natural places with cultural landscapes. It spoke to unsettled concerns about changing gender relations by celebrating women captives who exhibited the supposed female attributes of maternalism and a community orientation but who, in captivity, gained the masculine virtues of independence, individualism, strength, and self-sufficiency. Thus, with victory over the Indians behind them, Progressives could promote the adoption of some aspects of Indian cultures into a wholly American identity. Indians could vanish and become assimilated, while their virtues and knowledge would be incorporated into the larger culture.
One of Varley's main examples is Quaker and Progressive activist William Pryor Letchworth, who wanted to conserve a lovely stretch of New York's Genesee River. Concerned that the idea of conserving the land's natural values would not alone suffice, Letchworth used the story of well-known Seneca captive Mary Jemison to cement the land's significance and help preserve it from development. Eventually, Letchworth retrieved Jemison's remains when Buffalo's expansion threatened her gravesite and reburied them on a bluff above the Middle Falls of the Genesee. He also helped erect a statue of her and moved the Jemison log cabin to the site, thus marrying the scenic and historic. Later, Letchworth donated the property to the state for a park, hoping the Jemison story would encourage visitors to "incorporate Indian characteristics ... [and] a pious connection to the land, an internal quietness, and an anti-modern mentality" into their own lives (p. 74). Of course, Varley also notes, contemporary Indians were a different matter, and conservationists displayed no qualms about removing Native people from parklands.
Historians have long understood that representations of Indians--or, in this case, their captives--reveal much more about the creators of those texts, images, and monuments than they do their subjects. By zeroing in on a particularly unsettled period in American history, Varley finds that some Anglo-Americans turned to captivity narratives to assure themselves that the frontier "creation story" continued to inform nation-building as the United States adjusted to new realities, especially the waves of immigrants who supposedly threatened to upend it (p. 15). However, not all shared these views or turned to these narratives. Nevertheless, Varley's evidence, which comes completely from east of the Mississippi River, is convincing regarding a segment of the nation. The decision to organize the book by case study leads to much repetition, and a bit more acknowledgment of alternative visions (whether those of people such as anthropologist Franz Boas or non-Anglos) would have strengthened the volume. But the attention paid to monument building contributes to the genre of memory studies and adds a welcome eastern Native American element to that literature.
SHERRY L. SMITH
Southern Methodist University
Smith, Sherry L.
QUOTED: The work is well organized, presenting its thematic elements ... through a skillful discussion of the frontier narratives.
Varley, Molly K.: Americans recaptured: Progressive Era memory of frontier captivity
R.A. Shaddy
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 52.12 (Aug. 2015): p2087.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Varley, Molly K. Americans recaptured: Progressive Era memory of frontier captivity. Oklahoma, 2015. 230p bibl index afp ISBN 9780806144931 cloth, $34.95
52-6590
E85
CIP
Historian Varley (Univ. of Montana) has published an intriguing study. Set in the turn-of-the-century Progressive Era, Varley asserts that Americans looked back on the earlier days of the Republic to confirm the rightness of their national development and the worthiness of individual sufferings by using the narratives and accounts of individuals held captive by Native Americans. These stories collectively became, she writes, "the vital link between the frontier past and the modern future." The qualities from the frontier period (rather, those thought to be positive) would be maintained, furthered by the captivity narratives and accounts. A very useful bibliography, "Progressive Era Indian Captivity Narratives," reveals the sources of the study. Hopefully, these narratives will be further mined for scholarly insights. The work is well organized, presenting its thematic elements (including democracy, frontier violence, feminism, the recreation/affirmation of a national identity) through a skillful discussion of the frontier narratives. For libraries supporting upper-level undergraduate and graduate research in US history, especially US intellectual and cultural history, and American studies. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--R. A. Shaddy, Queens College (City University of New York)
Shaddy, R.A.