Early New England

The Science of the Soul challenges long-standing notions of Puritan provincialism as antithetical to the Enlightenment. Sarah Rivett demonstrates that, instead, empiricism and natural philosophy combined with Puritanism to transform the scope of religious activity in colonial New England from the 1630s to the Great Awakening of the 1740s. In an unprecedented move, Puritan ministers from Thomas Shepard and John Eliot to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards studied the human soul using the same systematic methods that philosophers applied to the study of nature. In particular, they considered the testimonies of tortured adolescent girls at the center of the Salem witch trials, Native American converts, and dying women as a source of material insight into the divine. Conversions and deathbed speeches were thus scrutinized for evidence of grace in a way that bridged the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the divine. In this way, the "science of the soul" was as much a part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy as it was part of post-Reformation theology. Rivett's account restores the unity of religion and science in the early modern world and highlights the role and importance of both to transatlantic circuits of knowledge formation.

A New York Times Editor’s Choice "This book is an original achievement, the kind of history that chastens our historical memory as it makes us wiser." —David W. Blight Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Widely hailed as a “powerfully written” history about America’s beginnings (Annette Gordon-Reed), New England Bound fundamentally changes the story of America’s seventeenth-century origins. Building on the works of giants like Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, Wendy Warren has not only “mastered that scholarship” but has now rendered it in “an original way, and deepened the story” (New York Times Book Review). While earlier histories of slavery largely confine themselves to the South, Warren’s “panoptical exploration” (Christian Science Monitor) links the growth of the northern colonies to the slave trade and examines the complicity of New England’s leading families, demonstrating how the region’s economy derived its vitality from the slave trading ships coursing through its ports. And even while New England Bound explains the way in which the Atlantic slave trade drove the colonization of New England, it also brings to light, in many cases for the first time ever, the lives of the thousands of reluctant Indian and African slaves who found themselves forced into the project of building that city on a hill. We encounter enslaved Africans working side jobs as con artists, enslaved Indians who protested their banishment to sugar islands, enslaved Africans who set fire to their owners’ homes and goods, and enslaved Africans who saved their owners’ lives. In Warren’s meticulous, compelling, and hard-won recovery of such forgotten lives, the true variety of chattel slavery in the Americas comes to light, and New England Bound becomes the new standard for understanding colonial America.

This book presents a unique perspective on life in Colonial England, exposing many misconceptions and depicting how elements of its culture that are typically regarded as marginal—such as the activities of pirates—actually had an extensive impact of the populace. The daily lives of most colonial New Englanders were much more colorful and exotic than the drab, pious picture many of us have in mind. Daily Life in Colonial New England exposes as myth much of what we might believe about this era and reveals surprising truths—for example, that sex was openly discussed in Colonial times and was regarded as a welcome necessity of married life, and that women had more legal and marital rights than they did in the 19th century. The book describes topics such as the legal and sexual rights of women, the extent of infant mortality; the lives of underclass citizens who formed the majority in New England, such as indentured servants, African slaves, debtors, and criminals; and the integral role that pirates played in business and employment during the Colonial period. Readers will gain deeper insight into what life during this period was like through accounts of the real terror of being one of the accused in witch hunts and the sympathy that the general population had for dissidents who were questioned and arrested by the government. Primary materials that range from legal documents to sermons, letters, and diaries are used as sources that verify historical ideas and events.

Focusing on the Connecticut River Valley—New England's longest river and largest watershed— Strother Roberts traces the local, regional, and transatlantic markets in colonial commodities that shaped an ecological transformation in one corner of the rapidly globalizing early modern world. Reaching deep into the interior, the Connecticut provided a watery commercial highway for the furs, grain, timber, livestock, and various other commodities that the region exported. Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy shows how the extraction of each commodity had an impact on the New England landscape, creating a new colonial ecology inextricably tied to the broader transatlantic economy beyond its shores. This history refutes two common misconceptions: first, that globalization is a relatively new phenomenon and its power to reshape economies and natural environments has only fully been realized in the modern era and, second, that the Puritan founders of New England were self-sufficient ascetics who sequestered themselves from the corrupting influence of the wider world. Roberts argues, instead, that colonial New England was an integral part of Britain's expanding imperialist commercial economy. Imperial planners envisioned New England as a region able to provide resources to other, more profitable parts of the empire, such as the sugar islands of the Caribbean. Settlers embraced trade as a means to afford the tools they needed to conquer the landscape and to acquire the same luxury commodities popular among the consumer class of Europe. New England's native nations, meanwhile, utilized their access to European trade goods and weapons to secure power and prestige in a region shaken by invading newcomers and the diseases that followed in their wake. These networks of extraction and exchange fundamentally transformed the natural environment of the region, creating a landscape that, by the turn of the nineteenth century, would have been unrecognizable to those living there two centuries earlier.

The idea of covenant was at the heart of early New England society. In this singular book David Weir explores the origins and development of covenant thought in America by analyzing the town and church documents written and signed by seventeenth-century New Englanders. Unmatched in the breadth of its scope, this study takes into account all of the surviving covenants in all of the New England colonies. Weir's comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century covenants leads to a more complex picture of early New England than what emerges from looking at only a few famous civil covenants like the Mayflower Compact. His work shows covenant theology being transformed into a covenantal vision for society but also reveals the stress and strains on church-state relationships that eventually led to more secularized colonial governments in eighteenth-century New England. He concludes that New England colonial society was much more "English" and much less "American" than has often been thought, and that the New England colonies substantially mirrored religious and social change in Old England.

"This is an amazing study, a memoir which provides insight intofamily abuse in 18th century America.... a significant volume which enhances ourknowledge of social and religious life in New England. It is also a movingcontribution to the literature of spirituality." -- Review andExpositor "Students of American culture are indebted to AnnTaves for editing this fascinating and revealing document and for providing it withfull annotation and an illuminating introduction." -- American StudiesInternational "This is above all an eminently teachable text, which raises important issues in the history of religion, women, and the family andabout the place of violence in American life." -- New EnglandQuarterly ..". stimulating, enlightening, and provocative..." -- Journal of Ecumenical Studies Abigail Abbot Bailey wasa devout 18th-century Congregationalist woman whose husband abused her, committedadultery with their female servants, and practiced incest with one of theirdaughters. This new, fully annotated edition of her memoirs, featuring a detailedintroduction, offers a thoughtful analysis of the role of religion amidst the trialsof the author's everyday life.