Gilbert Ruggles Tucker was born 9 January 1807 in Digby, Nova Scotia. His parents were Charles Tucker and Welthe Ruggles. He married Evelina Snyder 20 August 1831 in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. They had nine children. They moved to Boston in 1849 and to Winona, Minnesota in 1855. Gilbert died in 1875 in Philadelphia. Ancestors, descendants and relatives lived mainly in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nova Scotia and England.

This copiously documented volume sheds new light on one of the earliest families to settle in Virginia, that of Captain William Tucker of London, and on a number of allied families whose progenitors figured in the early history of the Virginia and Maryland colonies.

This Christian conception of belief structures the most familiar understandings of modern secularism, articulated most famously by John Locke in his "Letter Concerning Toleration." Tucker reads Locke's "Letter"' alongside Jewish philosopher/rabbi Moses Mendelssohn's 1783 critique of Locke, Jerusalem: Or On Religious Power and Judaism, and the Jewish tradition of the minyan, making a case for the existence of an alternative history of publicness borrowing from Jewish conceptions of communal life and the proper relations of actions and ideas. In throwing light on a genealogy of Jewish practices aimed at the deliberate creation of collectives constituted by their grappling with contingent, historical time, Tucker argues for the existence of a Jewish tradition of republicanism, of democracy.