Saturday Review: “Becoming the Lost Colony” a review by Donald Paul Haspel in NCLR Online Winter 2025 of Charles R. Ewen and E. Thomson Shields Jr.’s book, Becoming the Lost Colony (2024)
Another early look at a review in the forthcoming NCLR Online Winter 2025 issue!
North Carolina’s favorite long-time mystery gets another turn in the spotlight, this time in a review of sources. In his review of Becoming the Lost Colony, Haspel writes, “Authors Ewen and Shields effectively bring their respective areas of expertise to this work. Ewen is a historical archaeologist, and Shields, a retired professor of English specializing in early American and frontier literature, giving this book a helpful multidisciplinary perspective. Coming from different fields, with differing standards for evaluating evidence, Ewen and Shields do an effective job of tracing the history of the Roanoke mystery….” The book offers many different scenarios proposed by Ewen and Shields of what may have happened to the missing colonists.
Haspel continues, saying, “A thoughtful conclusion, “What We Don’t Know and How We Don’t Know It,” provides examples of the sometimes-dizzying number of evocations of the Lost Colony’s legacy in modern popular culture – everything from a Stephen King mini-series to episodes of Supernatural, Sleepy Hollow, and American Horror Story, and even a sequel to Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. And at the end of it all, the authors return to what has been a consistent area of emphasis throughout the book: while they “hate to admit that a mystery might never be solved” (173), the authors ask that readers not “ask us where we think the Lost Colony went. Both of us will say, ‘I don’t know.’ And mean it”
Read the preview from the Online Winter 2025 issue! And order the book from the publisher.
