![]() ![]() uncovers a persistent struggle between moral authorities and both popular customs and individual urges. Drawing on diaries, letters, and other private papers, as well as legal records and official documents. ![]() His account spans two centuries and most of British North America, from New England to the Caribbean, exploring the social, political, and legal dynamics that shaped a diverse sexual culture. In overturns conventional wisdom about the sexual values and customs of colonial Americans. These depictions of colonial North America's sexual culture sharply contradict the stereotype of puritanical abstinence that persists in the popular imagination. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican minister in South Carolina in 1766, described the region as a "stage of debauchery" in which polygamy was "very common", "concubinage general", and "bastardy no disrepute". Summary: In 1695, John Miller, a clergyman traveling through New York, found it appalling that so many couples lived together without ever being married and that no one viewed "ante-nuptial fornication" as anything scandalous or sinful. ![]()
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