Excerpt from Plain Dealing, or News From New England It is now some time since a friend, knowing that I had some curi osity in relation to matters of antiquity, and thinking I might find some thing to gratify it in a small folio, in manuscript, in broken but venerable binding, which was then in his possession, placed the same in my hands. He did not know the writer or the contents 3 for the style of penmanship was that of more than two centuries ago, and although not unusually indistinct for its kind, could not easily be read by one unaccustomed to the chirography of the time. It proved, on inspection, to be a journal book kept by thomas lechford, whose claim ti) the reputation of having been the first Boston lawyer is, I believe, unquestioned. It con tains a record of the business transactions in which he was, from day to day, engaged, commencing with his settlement in Boston, and con tinned until his return to England; embracing many facts of historical and genealogical interest. I have awaited a season of leisure and relief from other occupations to transcribe and prepare it for publication. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A reflection on the metaphor of the body politic throughout American history

The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation of a unique culture. Here Jim Egan offers an unprecedented look at how early modern American writers helped make this notion of experience so powerful that we now take it as a given rather than as the product of hard-fought rhetorical battles waged over ways of imagining one's relationship to a larger social community. In order to show how our modern notion of experience emerges from a historical change that experience itself could not have brought about, he turns to works by seventeenth-century writers in New England and reveals the ways in which they authorized experience, ultimately producing a rhetoric distinctive to the colonies and supportive of colonialism. Writers such as John Smith, William Wood, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Tompson, and William Hubbard were sensitive to the challenge experiential authority posed to established social hierarchies. Egan argues that they used experience to authorize a supplementary status system that would at once enhance England's economic, political, and spiritual status and provide a new basis for regulating English and native populations. These writers were assuaging fears over how exposure to alien environments threatened actual English bodies and also the imaginary body that authorized English monarchy and allowed English subjects to think of themselves as a nation. By reimagining the English nation, these supporters of English colonialism helped create a modern way of imagining national identity and individual subject formation.

"Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--