The War in Words: Reading the Dakota Conflict Through the Captivity Literature (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780803213708)

The War in Words is the first book to study the captivity and confinement narratives generated by a single American war as it traces the development and variety of the captivity narrative genre. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola examines the complex 1862 Dakota Conflict (also called the Dakota War) by focusing on twenty-four of the dozens of narratives that European Americans and Native Americans wrote about it. This six-week war was the deadliest confrontation between whites and Dakotas in Minnesota's history. Conducted at the same time as the Civil War, it is sometimes called Minnesota's Civil War because it was--and continues to be--so divisive. The Dakota Conflict aroused impassioned prose from participants and commentators as they disputed causes, events, identity, ethnicity, memory, and the all-important matter of the war's legacy. Though the study targets one region, its ramifications reach far beyond Minnesota in its attention to war and memory. An ethnography of representative Dakota Conflict narratives and an analysis of the war's historiography, The War in Words includes new archival information, historical data, and textual criticism.

Author: Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola
ISBN-10: 0803213700
ISBN-13: 9780803213708
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 05/01/2009
Pages: 398
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2010