Saltwater

280 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 26 halftones, notes, index

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8538-0
Published: February 2025

Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press

Hardcover Available February 2025, but pre-order your copy today!

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Death is easy to locate in the archives of early America. Grief is not so easily pinned down. Yet it was a near constant companion for the men and women that settled in what is now New England. Their lives were a kaleidoscope of small-scale tragedies that suffused and colored everyday experiences. This pervasive suffering was exacerbated by unfamiliar environments and exposure to the anguish of Indigenous and Black Americans, unsettling well-worn frameworks to produce new dimensions of everyday grief. Mary Eyring traces these fleeting, often mundane, glimpses of grief in the archives—a note about a sailor maimed during a whaling voyage, the hint of a miscarriage in a court record, the suggestion of domestic violence within a tract on witchcraft, a house sent up in flames at the opening of a captivity narrative—to show how the cumulative weight of grief created a persistent mood that influenced public and private affairs in sweeping ways largely unexamined by previous scholars.

With piercing insights and evocative prose, Eyring follows grief across generations and oceans to reveal a language of suffering understood and shared across diverse early American communities.

About the Author

Mary Eyring is associate professor of English and American studies at Brigham Young University.
For more information about Mary Eyring, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"In Saltwater, 'grief' names trouble of all sorts: pain, suffering, affliction, injury, discomfort, sorrow. It hangs in the air as a lingering mood: subtle, quiet, gnawing. Treating equally the physical and the psychic, the experiential and the expressive, Eyring teaches us how to listen to those who grieve and how openness to pain changes our perception of the past, and of the present.”—Kathleen Donegan, University of California, Berkeley

"A profound meditation on the universality and historical specificity of grief, Saltwater traces a historical mood across court records, testimonies, medical tracts, and the land and water traversed by Indigenous and Black Americans as well as European settlers. This book is essential reading for early Americanists and a timely reflection on the subtle forms of grief that constitute the human experience."—Sarah Rivett, Princeton University

"Both brilliant and beautiful, this book reframes grief as 'elemental rather than episodic,' seeping into the grounds of society and influencing the structures that rose from its soil. With deft theory, careful definitions, and extraordinary discernment, this book changes how we understand both early American literature and the history of emotions—a must-read book that models how scholarship pays attention to the language of suffering."—Abram Van Engen, Washington University in St. Louis