My favorite text book* for the ugly truths of colonization is American Colonies by Alan Taylor (Penguin, 2001). It's very bluntly written.
*Which went with my favorite U.S. History class - it was taught by a doctorate out of Holland, so nothing was candy-coated in the traditional Manifest Destiny/Master Narrative that usually colours such courses when taught by Americans. It was fantastic!
One of the most stunning things I learned in that course was that Puritans actually had back-alley abortions within two to three generations of the original landing in New England. There's a case in Massachusetts where the local quack out of Rhode Island performed an abortion on a wealthy girl who was knocked up by a wealthy boy, who talked her into the abortion so he could freely marry someone else. She did it, and died for it - the quack punctured her uterine wall and she bled to death before the night was out. There was a cover-up in the community, and the wealthy boy became a very prestigious man. Both families remained friends.
I would kill to find this article again. It's buried somewhere in my mass of stuff I kept after I graduated university, but it's like going through an Archive to find it. :(
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*Which went with my favorite U.S. History class - it was taught by a doctorate out of Holland, so nothing was candy-coated in the traditional Manifest Destiny/Master Narrative that usually colours such courses when taught by Americans. It was fantastic!
One of the most stunning things I learned in that course was that Puritans actually had back-alley abortions within two to three generations of the original landing in New England. There's a case in Massachusetts where the local quack out of Rhode Island performed an abortion on a wealthy girl who was knocked up by a wealthy boy, who talked her into the abortion so he could freely marry someone else. She did it, and died for it - the quack punctured her uterine wall and she bled to death before the night was out. There was a cover-up in the community, and the wealthy boy became a very prestigious man. Both families remained friends.
I would kill to find this article again. It's buried somewhere in my mass of stuff I kept after I graduated university, but it's like going through an Archive to find it. :(