With the vision of a historian and the voice of a novelist, prize?winning author John Demos explores the social, cultural, and psychological roots of the scourge that is witch-hunting, both in the remote past and today. The Enemy Within chronicles the most prominent witch-hunts of the Western world?women and men who were targeted by suspicious neighbors and accused of committing horrific crimes by supernatural means?and shows how the fear of witchcraft has fueled recurrent cycles of accusation, persecution, and purging. A unique and fascinating book, it illumines the dark side of communities driven to rid themselves of perceived evil, no matter what the human cost.

The Enemy Within: A Short History of Witch-Hunting

History

DEMOS, JOHN

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Penguin Publishing Group

The Tried and the True: Native American Women Confronting Colonization (Young Oxford History of Women in the United States)

The first of the women we now call Native American were among the prehistoric nomads who crossed a land bridge between Asia and North America 40,000 years ago. Over centuries, these humans formed larger bands, and eventually farming villages and even larger units, the seeds of the many tribes and nations that we call Indians or Native Americans. In most of these cultures, women held positions of honor in the community. John Demos looks at four Native American groups--the Puebloans of the North American Southwest, the Iroquois of the Northeast woodlands, the fur-trading tribes of the central Great Lakes region, and the Cherokees of the interior Southeast--and explores the possibilities open to women and how colonization by Europeans forever changed their lives. In many Indian tribes, property passed through the female line, from mothers to daughters to granddaughters, giving women considerable power and influence through the link to their clan. Women often held the primary responsibility for farming, craft production, and even house construction or boat building. Behind this broad array of roles and duties lay a fundamental respect for women as women. In startling contrast to the premodern European view, Native American cultures supported a balanced view of the sexes. Men were considered superior in some ways, women in others, and both were necessary to the survival of the group. Contact with European explorers and missionaries, the effects of the American Revolution, and the new United States government's policies toward Native American cultures irrevocably transformed every tribe. As a result Native American culture declined and women in particular lost opportunities, influence, and status that had formerly belong to them. But The Tried and the True is not only a story of decline. John Demos looks at the full range of Native American women's experiences and finds that words like adaptation, recovery, and survival also apply. These first American women laid the foundation for future generations and began a struggle for equality and respect that continues today.

Children's Books

Biographies

Oxford University Press

The first of the women we now call Native American were among the prehistoric nomads who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America 20,000 years ago. Over centuries, these nomads formed larger groups, and eventually farming villages, the seeds of the many tribes and nations of Native Americans. In this volume John Demos looks at four Native American groups--the Puebloans of the North American Southwest, the Iroquois of the Northeast woodlands, the fur trading tribes of the central Great Lakes region, and the Cherokees of the interior Southeast. In the common view of early white (and usually male) observers, Native American women lived lives of drudgery, while men hunted and engaged in warfare. Demos offers a different view as he explores the life experiences of Native American women, their culture, and the ways that contacts between Native Americans and white Europeans forever changed their lives.

A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony

The year 2000 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of A Little Commonwealth by Bancroft Prize-winning scholar John Demos. This groundbreaking study examines the family in the context of the colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. Basing his work on physical artifacts, wills, estate inventories, and a variety of legal and official enactments, Demos portrays the family as a structure of roles and relationships, emphasizing those of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant. The book's most startling insights come from a reconsideration of commonly-held views of American Puritans and of the ways in which they dealt with one another. Demos concludes that Puritan "repression" was not as strongly directed against sexuality as against the expression of hostile and aggressive impulses, and he shows how this pattern reflected prevalent modes of family life and child-rearing. The result is an in-depth study of the ordinary life of a colonial community, located in the broader environment of seventeenth-century America. Demos has provided a new foreword and a list of further reading for this second edition, which will offer a new generation of readers access to this classic study.

Americas

The year 2000 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of A Little Commonwealth by Bancroft Prize-winning scholar John Demos. This groundbreaking study examines the family in the context of the colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. Basing his work on physical artifacts, wills, estate inventories, and a variety of legal and official enactments, Demos portrays the family as a structure of roles and relationships, emphasizing those of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant. The book's most startling insights come from a reconsideration of commonly-held views of American Puritans and of the ways in which they dealt with one another. Demos concludes that Puritan "repression" was not as strongly directed against sexuality as against the expression of hostile and aggressive impulses, and he shows how this pattern reflected prevalent modes of family life and child-rearing. The result is an in-depth study of the ordinary life of a colonial community, located in the broader environment of seventeenth-century America. Demos has provided a new foreword and a list of further reading for this second edition, which will offer a new generation of readers access to this classic study.

Parenting & Relationships

Celebrating two collectors’ passion for Americana and the window it provides into the everyday beauty of the past Becoming America offers a multifaceted view of one of the foremost collections of 18th- and 19th-century American folk and decorative art from the rural Northeast. Essays by leading specialists discuss the culture of furniture workshops, exuberant painted decoration, techniques of sewing and quilting, and poignant stories about the families depicted in the portraits. The collection itself includes Shaker boxes, a beaded Iroquois hat, embroidered samplers, metalwork, scrimshaw, handwoven rugs, ceramics, and a weather vane. The majority of these works have never before been published. With lively essays and profuse illustrations, this handsome volume brings to life the aesthetic of early Americans living in the countryside and is an essential exploration of the period’s taste and style.

Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art

Arts & Photography

Nielsen, Christina

Frank, Robin Jaffee

Hollander, Stacy C.

Warren, Elizabeth V.

Fielding, Jonathan

Fielding, Karin

Priddy III, Sumpter

Wheatcroft, David

History & Criticism

Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World

Viking Books

In this intimate, engaging book, John Demos offers an illuminating portrait of how colonial Americans, from the first settlers to the postrevolutionary generation, viewed their life experiences. He also offers an invaluable inside look into the craft of a master social historian as he unearths--in sometimes unexpected places--fragments of evidence that help us probe the interior lives of people from the faraway past. 
 The earliest settlers lived in a traditional world of natural cycles that shaped their behavior: day and night; seasonal rhythms; the lunar cycle; the life cycle itself. Indeed, so basic were these elements that "almost no one felt a need to comment on them." Yet he finds cyclical patterns--in the seasonal foods they ate, in the spike in marriages following the autumn harvest. Witchcraft cases reveal the different emotional reactions to day versus night, as accidental mishaps in the light become fearful nighttime mysteries. During the transitional world of the American Revolution, people began to see their society in newer terms but seemed unable or unwilling to come to terms with that novelty. Americans became new, Demos points out, before they fully understood what it meant. Their cyclical frame of reference was coming unmoored, giving way to a linear world view in early nineteenth-century America that is neatly captured by Kentucky doctor Daniel Drake's description of the chronography of his life. 
 In his meditation on these three worlds, Demos brilliantly demonstrates how large historical forces are reflected in individual lives. With the imaginative insights and personable touch that we have come to expect from this fine chronicler of the human condition, Circles and Lines is vintage John Demos. (20040528)

Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies)

Harvard University Press

Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award The astonishing story of a unique missionary project—and the America it embodied—from award-winning historian John Demos. Near the start of the nineteenth century, as the newly established United States looked outward toward the wider world, a group of eminent Protestant ministers formed a grand scheme for gathering the rest of mankind into the redemptive fold of Christianity and “civilization.” Its core element was a special school for “heathen youth” drawn from all parts of the earth, including the Pacific Islands, China, India, and, increasingly, the native nations of North America. If all went well, graduates would return to join similar projects in their respective homelands. For some years, the school prospered, indeed became quite famous. However, when two Cherokee students courted and married local women, public resolve—and fundamental ideals—were put to a severe test. The Heathen School follows the progress, and the demise, of this first true melting pot through the lives of individual students: among them, Henry Obookiah, a young Hawaiian who ran away from home and worked as a seaman in the China Trade before ending up in New England; John Ridge, son of a powerful Cherokee chief and subsequently a leader in the process of Indian “removal”; and Elias Boudinot, editor of the first newspaper published by and for Native Americans. From its birth as a beacon of hope for universal “salvation,” the heathen school descends into bitter controversy, as American racial attitudes harden and intensify. Instead of encouraging reconciliation, the school exposes the limits of tolerance and sets off a chain of events that will culminate tragically in the Trail of Tears. In The Heathen School, John Demos marshals his deep empathy and feel for the textures of history to tell a moving story of families and communities—and to probe the very roots of American identity.

The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic

KNOPF

Nominated for the National Book Award and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize. The setting for this haunting and encyclopedically researched work of history is colonial Massachusetts, where English Puritans first endeavoured to "civilize" a "savage" native populace. There, in February 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband. Out of this incident, The Bancroft Prize-winning historian John Devos has constructed a gripping narrative that opens a window into North America where English, French, and Native Americans faced one another across gilfs of culture and belief, and sometimes crossed over.

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

Vintage

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DEMOS, JOHN. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by DEMOS, JOHN

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by DEMOS, JOHN. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Enemy Within: A Short History of Witch-Hunting

The Tried and the True: Native American Women Confronting Colonization (Young Oxford History of Women in the United States)

The Tried and the True: Native American Women Confronting Colonization (Young Oxford History of Women in the United States)

A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony

A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony

Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art

The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World

Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies)

The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America