Finalist for the 2004 Frederick Douglass Prize
A century after the Pilgrims' landing, the ongoing interactions of
conquered Indians, English settlers, and enslaved Africans in southern
New England had produced a closely interwoven, though radically divided,
colonial society. In Bodies Politic, John Wood Sweet argues that the
coming together of these diverse peoples profoundly shaped the character
of colonial New England, the meanings of the Revolution in the North and
the making of American democracy.
Grounded in a remarkable array of original sources--from censuses and
newspapers todiaries, archival images, correspondence, and court
records--this innovative and intellectually sweeping work excavates the
dramatic confrontations and subtle negotiations by which Indians,
Africans, and Anglo-Americans defined their respective places in early
New England. Citizenship, as Sweet reveals, was defined in meeting
houses as well as in court houses, in bedrooms as well as on
battlefields, in medical experiments and cheap jokes as well as on the
streets.
The cultural conflicts and racial divisions of colonial society not only
survived the Revolution but actually became more rigid and absolute in
the early years of the Republic. Why did conversion to Christianity fail
to establish cultural common ground? Why did the abolition of slavery
fail to produce a more egalitarian society? How did people of color
define their places within--or outside of--the new American nation?
Bodies Politic reveals how the racial legacy of early New England
shaped the emergence of the nineteenth-century North--and continues,
even to this day, to shape all our lives.
