Martin’s confession relates outlaw adventures that appear to be original. But were they real? 

The Proctor of the play was inspired by Miller’s projection of himself into events of 1692 and it is worth digging a bit deeper into the family matters between John and Elizabeth. 

“The life of a citizen,” they reminded the all-male jury, “lies in the hands of woman.” The result made prosecuting sexual assaults among acquaintances all but impossible.  

Brothel guides tended to be small, making them easy to conceal. They also mimicked other types of publications to make it easier to hide the guides’ true purpose.

In 1872, a small group of juvenile inmates challenged the terms of their incarceration, but even their modest success suggests the hazards of imagining children’s rights outside of human rights.

The Puritan freemen may have the loudest voices in the archive; but theirs are not the only narratives being told.

Mather, like most other Christians of the time, also believed that racial equality before God did not demand equality on Earth–and, in particular, that it was wholly compatible with the institution of slavery.

The book is both an intersectional study of crime and an intersectional study of gender, poverty, and class.

If blackmail is ultimately about silence, and if silence cannot—by definition—be tracked, how is one to find signs that blackmail might be present?

“While bringing an incident of rape to legal officials was undoubtedly challenging for all victims, ironically, the cases that might be most successfully prosecuted were often the most difficult for victims to bring to court.”

It should be said that the founders’ views on these matters have not survived strict historical scrutiny.

Sentimental reformist oration, fugitive confession, and the personal epistle are all represented in this text.

“Regardless of who was engaged in the business, the very nature of the business seemed to contradict the United States’s conception of itself, and thus the broker and the pawner were to remain objects of a derision that went beyond ethnic prejudice.”

No saga of personal hardship and aristocratic skullduggery so captivated the British public in the eighteenth century as Annesley’s turbulent life.

If history is any guide, the Treasury Department has an uphill fight ahead of it; counterfeiters have a knack for circumventing almost any obstacle put in their way.

“The thing is a fake from beginning to end,” Corning replied.

There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example
of how it works.

Harmony was essential to the business of piracy; pirates who got along with one another stood a better chance of success in their ventures.

Why did authorities feel the need to apply police powers to sex?

The main tale is a cautionary one, although it turns not on the dire consequences of legislating morality but instead on the futility of such attempts.

“[I]f justice—holding the guilty accountable—is actually a social priority, is it not possible that knowledge of a defendant’s past might further that end?”

Jodi Schorb extends and revises the historiography of literacy, punishment, and incarceration during the long eighteenth century in British North America and the early United States.

A welcome new edition of George Lippard’s provocative 1850 novella–

Swashbucklers, rogues, and scoundrels—the legacy of early modern sea rovers in popular culture has made piracy basically synonymous with villainy. […]

As a bleak and miserable winter gave way to a bleak and miserable spring, the prisoners began to wonder why, if there really was a peace, they had not been exchanged.

When Thomas Harris’s ghost appeared to his childhood friend William Briggs across a field one March morning in 1792, he […]

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“Neither the movie nor Asbury’s books help historians in getting Americans to understand the true nature of nineteenth-century urban America.”

Even on the old frontier, those who were at the top took pains to let everyone know.

Presented as part of the special issue “Early Cities of the Americas.”

“The reenactments that run through and, in the end, dominate the film portray the Webster-Parkman principals and events through a gothic lens that does not so much resurrect the past as relinquish it to ways of seeing and telling adopted from Hollywood movies and stylish television.”

“[S]eventeenth-century Protestants believed that the spirit of a dead person might appear in order to draw attention to “an injustice that might not be detected by other means’.”

I found out my pirate name: Calico Bess Kidd. I installed a Multi-Lingual Pirate Insult Generator on my laptop, you poxy bilge rat. […]

“If the many questions directed to a New York City history Website I co-supervise are any indication—including a certain befuddlement by visitors when they fail to locate information about events wholly invented in the film—audiences believe its story.”

EBay may be a great resource for avid collectors, but it has also opened up a world of antiquarian goods that may have never found their way into an archive or museum before now.

“Too often reenactments come across as just what they are–half-hearted attempts to make history come alive in a dramatic way without using the elements that make for dramatic story-telling . . .”

Massachusetts, after all, had not executed anyone for rape in twenty-seven years . . . Yet now . . . the community took a daughter’s accusation against her father so seriously that it sent a man to the gallows. What circumstances, we wondered, led to this extraordinary outcome?

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