Professor Ann Little (Colorado State University) – The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright: Communities of Women in the Northeast Borderlands.

Join us for a talk by Prof. Ann Little who will be speaking about her new book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright: Communities of Women in the Northeast Borderlands.

Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780) embodies the imperial conquest of North America like no other eighteenth-century figure, yet she has been largely written out of the story of American history. Born and raised to age seven in a New England garrison town, she was taken in wartime by the Wabanaki in 1703 and taught to pray as a Catholic and to live like a Native girl. At age twelve, she was enrolled in the Ursuline convent school as a student, where she would remain for the rest of her life as a choir nun, eventually becoming the first and only foreign-born Mother Superior of the order. Learn why she has been forgotten, and what remembering her can teach us.