The costs of total war, mobilization, and the end to modernity ultimately led to drastic shifts in the perceptions of identity across the globe, which led to decolonization and the birth to new nations, and whether or not the assimilation and abandonment of old traditional ways of life, as is the case presented by Leslie Marmon Silko in the novel Ceremony. In the novel Ceremony, Silko displayed how the identities of Native Americans who participated in World War II, fighting for the U.S., shifted from the time they were enlisted to their homecoming and how the assimilation and integration o...

• Word Count: 1178
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The novel "City of the Beasts," by Isabel Allende, is a mystical adventure about a terminally ill mother and the child who saves her from death. ... In the beginning of the novel, Alexander Cold - the protagonist of the story - is a fourteen year old boy in who is about to have his life turned upside down. ...

• Word Count: 530
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Alexie's first novel, Reservation Blues, was published in 1995 and is no exception to this. ... Within this novel Alexie manages to merge together the mythical and romanticized view of Native Americans (although Alexie "has been at pains to deflate just such romantic myths, whether steward of the earth, stoical warrior, shaman or savage") with a more realistic, and perhaps somewhat depressing, account of Native Americans regarding matters such as racism, religion, the commodification of Native American culture and life on the reservations including alcoholism and health service...

• Word Count: 2551
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Structurally, both novels are very different despite setting their protagonists on a journey of self-discovery that takes them through the American Southwest using memory flashbacks and Native American Mythology. ... She didn't really let Tayo learn the stories and ways of the Community of "the people" (as Silko refers to them throughout the novel). ... Both novels involve their protagonists doing battle to save their respective communities. ...

• Word Count: 1765
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The novel is comically littered with contradictory tones and gross inaccuracies in terms of frontier life, but in spite of the aforementioned, Cooper manages to convey his over-used American roughrider, Hawkeye, as a genuine model for nineteenth-century gunslinger heroes. ... Almost an advertisement for moving west, The Last of the Mohicans was one of the first novels to depict frontier life. ... These ideas coincide with other interpretations of the novel that had already adopted these same biblical motifs to explain its battles between good and evil, its ideas of Indian descent to hell, and ...

• Word Count: 1482
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In Joyce Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution, she discusses the lives of Americans after the American Revolution is over and when their new lives begins. She points out many different aspects of the Americans lives. Appleby shows how the Americans changed and developed over the years by using real...

• Word Count: 1352
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

With the narrative style of a novel rather than a historical record, Demos tells the story of Eunice Williams, a captured daughter of honored minister John Williams, to turn the worlds of master and captive upside down. ...

• Word Count: 1326
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Captivity narratives were popular with readers in both American and the European communities. Captivity narratives of Americans relate the experiences of whites enslaved by Native Americans and Africans enslaved by Americans. Two widely read captivity narratives are The Interesting Narrative of the ...

• Word Count: 1490
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The depiction of Christopher Columbus in the national media today is that of a charismatic leader and founder of the New World. According to Miller, it should be noted that Leif Erikson and his Viking comrades arrived in America some 500 years before Christopher Columbus even prepared for his voyage...

• Word Count: 1689
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate