"The "tragicall historie
Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3525211 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rachel B Herrmann (0000-0002-1676-7164, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 68 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 47 |
| Publication date | 2011-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5309/willmaryquar.68.1.0047 |
| OpenAlex | W1657860709 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 2 |
In the winter of 1609–10, Jamestown colonists struggled through a period that came to be known as the Starving Time. Historians have generally accepted the validity of cannibalism stories that George Percy and John Smith wrote in the following decade and a half, despite other contemporary accounts arguing that cannibalism never took place. On the basis of the existing evidence, it is impossible to say whether early settlers ate corpses, Indians, or dead wives; a more answerable question is how people in Virginia and London made use of cannibalism rumors for their own purposes. In the 1610s and 1620s, Starving Time narratives were responsible for effecting new laws about food production and consumption. Writers crafted their tales to reassure colonial investors that the Virginia project was still solvent. Such publications changed the idea of abundance, creating a turning point that forced colonists to become industrious producers rather than lazy gatherers. This reassessment of the Starving Time examines abundance in early Virginia and how seventeenth-century transformations of that concept created one of America’s first founding myths: that of avoiding starvation in the New World
Abundance (ecology · Archaeology · Art · Biology · Cannibalism · Colonialism · Ethnology · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Ecology · History
Bibliography of Books and Articles Published in English on Colonialism and Imperialism in 2011
A multidisciplinary study of a burnt and mutilated assemblage of human remains from a deserted Mediaeval village in England
What Would We Not Have Eaten?” Animals and Disgust in Colonial Starvation Narratives
The Limits of Disgust
Subject or Signifier
A Peru of Their Own
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,43 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2024 (13) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |