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.

"What a combination--John Winthrop, our first source on the early history of New England, and James Savage, the leading name in New England genealogy. "Savage's Edition of Winthrop's Journal," as this work is usually referred to, was inspired by the discovery of a third part (manuscript) of Winthrop's History of New England in the year 1816. Mr. Savage, a distinguished member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the author of the seminal Genealogical Dictionary of New England, was assigned the task of transcribing the newly discovered manuscript and integrating it with the previously published pages of Winthrop's Journal. Applying his customary acumen to the task, Savage completed his transcription and collation of the History of New England in time for an 1825 publication, adding his own learned annotations about the men, women, and events Winthrop referred to, yielding a work perhaps twice as long as the original journal"--Publisher website (January 2009).