Saltwater by Mary Eyring
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.
Mary Eyring is associate professor of English and American studies at Brigham Young University.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781469685380 |
| ISBN 10 | 1469685388 |
| Title | Saltwater |
| Author | Mary Eyring |
| Series | Published By The Omohundro Institute Of Early American History And Culture And The University Of North Carolina Press |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Publisher | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Year published | 2025-02-28 |
| Number of pages | 280 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |