"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.

Having arriving in the Province of Maine in 1641 with a brief to create both government and law for the fledgling colony, Thomas Gorges later recorded his policy as having ’steared as neere as we could to the course of Ingland’. Over the course of the next century the various colonial administrations all consciously measured their laws against that of England, whether their intention was imitation of or conscious opposition to, established English legal system. In order to trace the shifting and contested relationships between colonial laws and English laws, this book focuses on the prosecution of sexual misconduct. All crimes can threaten orderly society but no other crime posed quite the same long term implications as illicit sex resulting in the birth of illegitimate children who became their own social challenges. Sexual misconduct was, consequently, a major concern for early modern leaders, making it a particularly fruitful subject for studying the complex relationship between laws in England and laws in the English colonies. Political and ecclesiastical leaders create laws to coerce people to behave in a certain fashion and to convey wider messages about the societies they govern. When those same laws are broken, lawbreakers must be tried and punished by a means intended to serve as a warning to other would-be lawbreakers. In this book the two-part analysis of changing sexual misconduct laws and the resulting trial depositions highlights the ways in which ordinary New England colonists across New England both interacted with and responded to the growing Anglicization of their legal systems and makes the argument that these men and women saw themselves as taking part in a much larger process.

In 1678, the Puritan minister Samuel Nowell preached a sermon he called "Abraham in Arms," in which he urged his listeners to remember that "Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be a Souldier." The title of Nowell's sermon was well chosen. Abraham of the Old Testament resonated deeply with New England men, as he embodied the ideal of the householder-patriarch, at once obedient to God and the unquestioned leader of his family and his people in war and peace. Yet enemies challenged Abraham's authority in New England: Indians threatened the safety of his household, subordinates in his own family threatened his status, and wives and daughters taken into captivity became baptized Catholics, married French or Indian men, and refused to return to New England. In a bold reinterpretation of the years between 1620 and 1763, Ann M. Little reveals how ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways people in colonial New England, and their neighbors in New France and Indian Country, described their experiences in cross-cultural warfare. Little argues that English, French, and Indian people had broadly similar ideas about gender and authority. Because they understood both warfare and political power to be intertwined expressions of manhood, colonial warfare may be understood as a contest of different styles of masculinity. For New England men, what had once been a masculinity based on household headship, Christian piety, and the duty to protect family and faith became one built around the more abstract notions of British nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for the Empire. Based on archival research in both French and English sources, court records, captivity narratives, and the private correspondence of ministers and war officials, Abraham in Arms reconstructs colonial New England as a frontier borderland in which religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were permeable, fragile, and contested by Europeans and Indians alike.

You can come to understand the nature, causes, consequences, and treatments for domestic violence! In reading Women and Domestic Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach, you'll come to see the need for a more transdisciplinary attack on one of the world's greatest and most historically prevalent social crimes: spouse abuse. This collection of legal, psychological, criminological, and law enforcement approaches to this long-standing problem will expand your range of understanding and more directly focus your efforts to stamp out family abuse in your neighborhood. Overall, Women and Domestic Violence will show you how spousal abuse has damaged our society since the times of Homer, rocked our families since the colonists settled in America, and strained our prisons since the days of Julius Caesar. Also, more importantly, you'll explore current data regarding police handlings of domestic abuse calls and see what today's psychological literature is saying about the developments of this behavioral disorder. Specifically, you'll read about: the history of wife abuse the latest trends in civil legal relief an overview of how police deal with domestic violence calls the impact of batterer counseling on the frequency of domestic assault incidents Everyone, including chiefs of police, family science educators, law professors, judges, and psychologists interested in stemming the rising tide of domestic assault occurrences will want to read Women and Domestic Violence. Its timely and up-to-date contents will help steer your community away from repeating history's shameful mistakes, and you'll find what you can do in your field to restore discipline and contentment to the families in your neighborhood.

Teaching Religion and Violence is designed to help instructors to equip students to think critically about religious violence, particularly in the multicultural classroom.

From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades. Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a “tradwife” is gaining adherents on the right while polyamory wins converts on the left. It may seem as though debates over sex are more intense than ever, but as acclaimed historian Rebecca L. Davis demonstrates in Fierce Desires, we should not be too surprised, because Americans have been arguing over which kinds of sex are “acceptable”—and which are not—since before the founding itself. From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same-sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s, and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating four-hundred-year account of this nation’s sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica, and eighteenth-century romance novels, she recasts important episodes—Anthony Comstock’s crusade against smut among them—and, at the same time, unearths stories of little-remembered pioneers and iconoclasts, such as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and postwar female pleasure activist Betty Dodson. At the heart of the book is Davis’s argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the nineteenth century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in the process. The most comprehensive account of America’s sexual past since John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s 1988 classic, Intimate Matters, Davis’s magisterial work seeks to help us understand the turmoil of the present. It demonstrates how fiercely we have always valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them.

Offering an interpretation of the Revolutionary period that places women at the center, Joan R. Gundersen provides a synthesis of the scholarship on women's experiences during the era as well as a nuanced understanding that moves beyond a view of the war as either a "golden age" or a disaster for women. Gundersen argues that women's lives varied greatly depending on race and class, but all women had to work within shifting parameters that enabled opportunities for some while constraining opportunities for others. Three generations of women in three households personalize these changes: Elizabeth Dutoy Porter, member of the small-planter class whose Virginia household included an African American enslaved woman named Peg; Deborah Franklin, common-law wife of the prosperous revolutionary, Benjamin; and Margaret Brant, matriarch of a prominent Mohawk family who sided with the British during the war. This edition incorporates substantial revisions in the text and the notes to take into account the scholarship that has appeared since the book's original publication in 1996.

This study examines cases of fornication, bastardy, and paternity cases brought before the courts in Essex County, Massachusetts between 1640 and 1692. Prosecution and conviction rates, sentencing patterns, and socio-economic data, as well as attitudes, were analyzed to determine that women who bore illegitimate children were punished more severely than their male partners, and regarded with contempt by the majority of women.

This four-volume collection of primarily newly transcribed manuscript material brings together sources from both sides of the Atlantic and from a wide variety of regional archives. It is the first collection of its kind, allowing comparisons between the development of the family in England and America during a time of significant change. Volume 1: Many Families The eighteenth-century family group was a varied one. Documents attest to religious and racial diversity, as well as the hardships endured by the poor and working classes, such as widows, orphans and those born outside wedlock. Fictive families are also examined alongside more traditional family units bound by blood or law.

“An important new interpretation of how religious change shaped American cultural identity in the early republic.” —Journal of American History Northern New England, a rugged landscape dotted with transient settlements, posed challenges to the traditional town church in the wake of the American Revolution. Using the methods of spatial geography, Shelby M. Balik examines how migrants adapted their understanding of religious community and spiritual space to survive in the harsh physical surroundings of the region. The notions of boundaries, place, and identity they developed became the basis for spreading New England’s deeply rooted spiritual culture, even as it opened the way to a new evangelical age. “I strongly recommend Balik’s book for those studying colonial religious landscapes and heritages not only in New England, but in the nineteenth-century religious diasporas that swept the continent with varying mixes of European colonials and also African and Asian heritages.” —Stanley D. Brunn, University of Kentucky “In this beautifully written and richly researched work, Shelby Balik shows how the travels of early nineteenth century Methodists, Universalists and freewill Baptist itinerant missionaries and congregations recreated the geography of New England Protestantism, setting in motion (literally) a tension between religious rootedness and religious uprootedness, center and periphery, that endures to today. Early American religious history in Balik’s retelling of it is one of bodies in constant movement in and out and around the city on the hill. The delight Balik takes in maps and journeys is infectious. This is a wonderful addition to American religious historiography.” —Robert Orsi, Northwestern University