Of the many hundred individuals of European descent whose stories of captivity among the native peoples of North America were written and published during the seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries, Hannah Emerson Duston (also spelled Dustin or Dustan) is undoubtedly the most notorious and the most controversial. First published in 1697 with Cotton Mather's fast-day sermon Humiliations Follow'd by Deliverances as an example of "a Notable Deliverance from Captivity" and later republished by Mather with minor alterations in his Decennium Luctuosum (1699) and his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), the story of Hannah Duston's captivity among the Abenaki Indians of New England and her subsequent murder and scalping of ten of her Indian captors, including several children, has fascinated generations of readers. It has also provoked a variety of responses, ranging from her near canonization as an early American saint to her condemnation as a ruthless killer of the innocent.

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