Assistant Professor of English Kathleen Donegan is using literature to correct a one-sided view of early U.S. history as either an Anglo-American triumph or a Native American tragedy. Her book project, "Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and the Writing of Settlement in Colonial America," examines the focus on suffering in texts issuing from the first English settlements in North America and the Caribbean. English settlers of the Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth colonies reported highly traumatic experiences, as confirmed in accounts by bonded servants, African slaves, and Native Americans. The English accounts documented more than personal suffering. In Donegan's view they also gave settlers a way to confront and legitimize the violence that permeated their lives, and thus made it easier to bear by proving their capacity to survive. Their tales of misery contrast sharply with reports of debauchery during the English conquest of Barbados that Donegan also examines.