SOURCE: “Catharine Sedgwick's ‘Recital’ of the Pequot War,” in American Literature, Vol. 66, No. 4, December, 1994, pp. 641-62.

In the following essay, Gould discusses Puritan and revisionist versions of the Pequot War, suggesting that one such revisionist account is found in Sedgwick's novel Hope Leslie.

The Pequot War has caused more than its share of historiographic controversy. Revisionist historians have questioned the reliability of Puritan accounts of Captain John Mason's attack upon a Pequot fort in 1637, pointing out a regional bias which, the argument goes, has distorted an entire historiographic tradition. Francis Jennings, for one, has argued that “during the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth, the whole historical profession was dominated by historians who were not only trained in New England but at the same time were steeped in the accepted traditions of that region.”¹ The revisionists' refusal to treat Puritan narrative “as gospel,” however, has itself come...