Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America

Description

New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty. But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates, if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her "city on a hill" with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgments List of Illustrations INTRODUCTION. Great Expectations: The Promise of Sincerity CHAPTER 1. Moral Unmoorings: Fear and the Foundations of Settler Sincerity CHAPTER 2. Dreaming on Dry Land: Thoughtfulness beyond Good Intentions CHAPTER 3. Blood, Regret, and Tears: How to Put on Sincerity, and Why CHAPTER 4. The Happiest Memories: Duties, Debts, and the Generation of Freedom CHAPTER 5. Friendship, Fair and True: Sincerity Makes a Compromise with History CONCLUSION. Miserable Comforts: A Dialectical Lyric Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z