Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, same-sex couples had become visible as partners and parents, as well as integral members of straight families. This chapter demonstrates how these previous victories on behalf of the queer family made marriage equality possible. When the movement for marriage equality began, advocates emphasized that allowing same-sex couples to marry was a matter of ensuring justice and equality. However, that argument failed to persuade decisionmakers, who instituted same-sex marriage bans around the country. Advocates were only able to gain legal ground when they began emphasizing how discrimination harmed longstanding, devoted same-sex couples, the children they raised, and the straight parents who loved them. They were able to stake these claims because gay- and lesbian-headed households already existed, thanks to years of family-centered strategies. Although marriage equality is the queer rights movement’s best-known success, it came as a postscript to decades of family-centered strategies.

The 1636-1637 Pequot War and its aftermath were formative events in the making of New England and North America. The region’s first major colonial war eliminated the Pequots as a geopolitical power, opened southern New England to English domination, nearly annihilated the Pequots, and helped to establish patterns of extreme violence against Native Americans that shaped much of the continent north of Mexico. Unsurprisingly, few events in colonial North America have produced such prolonged and unresolved historical debate. This chapter will summarize the ongoing modern Pequot genocide debate, narrate the cataclysm in detail, provide quantitative estimates of its death toll, discuss dispersal and enslavement as a genocidal strategy, reevaluate colonists’ culpability, reconsider pre-genocide Pequot population estimates, and explain how this catastrophe constituted genocide under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.

In the eighteenth century, the Massachusetts House criminalized speech, and the general sessions courts prosecuted it, for being impolite as well as ungodly. Politeness became a core element of social order and elite white masculine identity. This study identified more than 1,600 criminal speech prosecutions in the records of justices and courts. These include any document that specified verbal threats or abuse; profane cursing or swearing; verbal noise; lying; false reports; defamatory speech; or perjury. Criminal procedure was simple and discretionary, and required widespread community participation in order to effectively prosecute impolite speech. Such prosecutions helped to define elite identity and status around matrices of sensibility, civility, and credibility. Sensibility was a moral and genteel quality not manifested by those prosecuted for noisy or abusive speech. Civility connoted pleasurable sociability that was undermined by contempt, cursing, and defamation. Credibility was the gentlemanly reputation for truthfulness, destroyed by lying, perjury, false news, and mumpers (pretended gentlemen). The Revolution replaced this regime with one based on respectability.

Chapter 7 draws together the arguments presented in the preceding chapters, to underline the way that traditions around bringing disputes to court interacted with a written bill of rights to make courts the fora for disputes over expression in Massachusetts, as it dealt with the challenges to authority posed by challengers to religious and social orthodoxy and the gradual unfolding of its own version of democracy. Though no less concerned with individual reputation, Nova Scotians’ struggles over the jurisdiction of political institutions and greater distance from reform movements shaped disputes over expression and the way that defenses to libel claims were conceived. In these two kindred places, legal cultures, constitutional understandings, publishing practices and the quirks of personality interacted with sociopolitical pressures to shape libel law in general and the defenses of truth and privilege in particular, matters vital to individuals and to the institutions of democracy.

Chapter 3 describes the evolution of privilege, as used by legislatures – especially in Nova Scotia – to discipline and punish both members and nonmembers for criticisms that impugned the dignity of the legislature or its members. As the reformist Nova Scotian assembly was, by the late 1820s, embroiled in budgetary disputes with the council, the stage was set for jurisdictional arguments. In his 1830 libel treatise the English writer Thomas Starkie advanced a framework to protect freedom of expression through expanding the reach of “qualified” privilege. Massachusetts courts were chiefly concerned with truth and bore a certain republican suspicion of privilege, so although the defense of privileged communication did arrive in Massachusetts, it did not attract much interest. In Nova Scotia, however, given the common law’s rejection of a truth defense to criminal libel and the prevalent concern with the jurisdiction of institutions, qualified privilege did take root, with journalist Joseph Howe relying heavily on Starkie in a famous trial in 1835.

This chapter introduces the framework for the comparison between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, the factors individuals confronted when they decided what type of proceeding to take over expression they disliked, the conceptual transition from the law concerning libels to libel law, the development of the defenses of privilege and truth, the emergence of the idea that obscene texts could be prosecuted as criminal libels, and the establishment of the courtroom as the site where individual claims to freedom of speech and conscience were brought in Massachusetts – but not Nova Scotia – against a backdrop of majoritarian violence.

Massachusetts was the last of the original thirteen American states to disestablish religion. Its 1780 constitution guaranteed freedom and equality to all peaceable private religions but also retained a “mild and equitable establishment” featuring (1) ceremonial public religious language, symbols, rituals, and oaths, (2) moral instruction in state schools, and 3) state collection of tithes and required religious worship. Lead draftsman John Adams crafted this approach as a political compromise between hardline establishmentarians and radical separationists in his day. But this view also reflected his belief that too little religious freedom is a recipe for hypocrisy and impiety, while too much religious freedom is an invitation to depravity and license. After 1780, this compromise fell apart as religious pluralism and political division over religion grew in the state. Amendments of 1821 and 1833 outlawed religious test oaths, mandatory worship, and state tithe collections, but the state retained its ceremonial and moral establishments.

Massachusetts was the last of the original thirteen American states to disestablish religion. Its 1780 constitution guaranteed freedom and equality to all peaceable private religions but also retained a “mild and equitable establishment” featuring (1) ceremonial public religious language, symbols, rituals, and oaths, (2) moral instruction in state schools, and 3) state collection of tithes and required religious worship. Lead draftsman John Adams crafted this approach as a political compromise between hardline establishmentarians and radical separationists in his day. But this view also reflected his belief that too little religious freedom is a recipe for hypocrisy and impiety, while too much religious freedom is an invitation to depravity and license. After 1780, this compromise fell apart as religious pluralism and political division over religion grew in the state. Amendments of 1821 and 1833 outlawed religious test oaths, mandatory worship, and state tithe collections, but the state retained its ceremonial and moral establishments.

This essay is based on a singular archive of “relations” made by lay people when they were made candidates for church membership in New World Cambridge, Massachusetts ca. 1638–1648. In these narratives, women and men recall the social experience of being among the “godly” in England, reflect on the decision to emigrate, and above all, map the ups and downs of their spiritual histories. These “relations” are paired with sermons preached by Thomas Shepard, the town minister, who addressed the same topics both in sermons and in a journal. Bringing these two sources together makes it possible to explore various dimensions of lay experience and pastoral perspective: continuities between old and New England, disruptions and self-critiques arising out of the transition to Massachusetts, echoes of the “Antinomian” controversy and its objections to some aspects of the practical divinity. Overall, this essay will attempt to redefine “Reformation” as a challenging mixture of the local and the general, and of adaptation and continuity.

Unlike modern originalists, Justice Joseph Story (1779–1845) endorsed the maxim that “Christianity is a part of the common law,” and he seems thus to have considered Christianity deeply entangled with the Constitution. A Harvard graduate and Massachusetts Unitarian, he did not consider the Constitution bound to any specific Christian orthodoxy. Rather, by the Revolution, American Christianity itself had become tolerant of differences in doctrine and worship, while sharing an understanding of moral duty, embodied in the common law. Thus he could at once subscribe to the proposition that Christianity is a part of the common law and decide religion cases so as to uphold the separation of church and state, protecting church property from state interference, and protecting a municipally-run school from clerical influence. On the issue of slavery, his commitments to a living faith and to a settled Constitution collided, calling into question the Christian constitutionalism to which he devoted his professional life.