This abridged edition of Winthrop's journal, which incorporates about 40 percent of the governor's text, with his spelling and punctuation modernized, includes a lively Introduction and complete annotation. It also includes Winthrop's famous lay sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity", written in 1630. As in the fuller journal, this abridged edition contains the drama of Winthrop's life - his defeat at the hands of the freemen for governor, the banishment and flight of Roger Williams to Rhode Island, the Pequot War that exterminated his Indian opponents, and the Antinomian controversy. Here is the earliest American document on the perpetual contest between the forces of good and evil in the wilderness - Winthrop's recounting of how God's Chosen People escaped from captivity into the promised land. While he recorded all the sexual scandal - rape, fornication, adultery, sodomy, and buggery - it was only to show that even in Godly New England the Devil was continually at work, and man must be forever militant.

For 350 years Governor John Winthrop's journal has been recognized as the central source for the history of Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s. Winthrop reported events--especially religious and political events--more fully and more candidly than any other contemporary observer. The governor's journal has been edited and published three times since 1790, but these editions are long outmoded. Richard Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle have now prepared a long-awaited scholarly edition, complete with introduction, notes, and appendices. This full-scale, unabridged edition uses the manuscript volumes of the first and third notebooks (both carefully preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society), retaining their spelling and punctuation, and James Savage's transcription of the middle notebook (accidentally destroyed in 1825). Winthrop's narrative began as a journal and evolved into a history. As a dedicated Puritan convert, Winthrop decided to emigrate to America in 1630 with members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who had chosen him as their governor. Just before sailing, he began a day-to-day account of his voyage. He continued his journal when he reached Massachusetts, at first making brief and irregular entries, followed by more frequent writing sessions and contemporaneous reporting, and finally, from 1643 onward, engaging in only irregular writing sessions and retrospective reporting. Naturally he found little good to say about such outright adversaries as Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson. Yet he was also adept at thrusting barbs at most of the other prominent players: John Endecott, Henry Vane, and Richard Saltonstall, among others. Winthrop built lasting significance into the seemingly small-scale actions of a few thousand colonists in early New England, which is why his journal will remain an important historical source.

As both a politician and a historian, Winthrop was an interpreter of foundational events in American history. Within his journal, therefore, lie resources for understanding the nature of leadership and the meaning of liberty in our past. Because of the ongoing Puritan legacy in American culture, Winthrop's journal may show us our own world, and possibly our future, in new ways. - Introduction.