Download or read book Held Captive by Indians written by Richard VanDerBeets and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the early white settlers, accounts of Indian captivities and massacres became America's first literature of catharsis - a means by which a population that disapproved of fiction and play-acting could satisfy its appetite for stories about other people's misfortunes. This collection of unaltered captivity narratives, first published in 1973, remains an invaluable source of information for historians and ethnologists, providing a fascinating glimpse of a vanished era. For this edition, VanDerBeets has written a new preface discussing the proliferation of recent scholarship about captivity narratives, especially those written by women.