Description
When we think of the key figures of early American history, we think of explorers, or pilgrims, or Native Americans--not cattle, or goats, or swine. But as Virginia DeJohn Anderson reveals in this brilliantly original account of colonists in New England and the Chesapeake region, livestock played a vitally important role in the settling of the New World.
Livestock, Anderson writes, were a central factor in the cultural clash between colonists and Indians as well as a driving the landscapes where the myths are set. It then provides a richly detailed timeline of mythic episodes from the origin of the cosmos to the end of the Heroic Age--plus an illustrated mythological dictionary listing significant characters, places, events, objects, and concepts.
Whether you wish to explore the world that gave rise to ancient mythology or research a specific piece of the whole, this handbook is the best introduction available to an extraordinary cast of charact ers(gods, nymphs, satyrs, monsters, heroes) and the natural and supernatural stages upon which their fates are played out.
Livestock, Anderson writes, were a central factor in the cultural clash between colonists and Indians as well as a driving the landscapes where the myths are set. It then provides a richly detailed timeline of mythic episodes from the origin of the cosmos to the end of the Heroic Age--plus an illustrated mythological dictionary listing significant characters, places, events, objects, and concepts.
Whether you wish to explore the world that gave rise to ancient mythology or research a specific piece of the whole, this handbook is the best introduction available to an extraordinary cast of charact ers(gods, nymphs, satyrs, monsters, heroes) and the natural and supernatural stages upon which their fates are played out.