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E-book
Author Mofford, Juliet Haines

Title The devil made me do it! : crime and punishment in early New England / Juliet Haines Mofford
Published Guilford, CT : Globe Pequot Press, ©2012

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 231 pages)
Contents Front Cover; Copryight; Contents; Preface; Body; Index; Acknowledgments; About the Author; Back Cover; Spine
Summary Tales of the country's original criminalsand how the courts punished them for their misdeeds<P style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt> <P style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt>Scarlet Letters, wanton dalliances, Sabbathbreaking, and debt: Colonial laws were easily broken and the malefactors who broke them, swiftly punished. How did our ancestors deal with murder and mayhem? How did seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England communities handle deviants? How have definitions of criminal behavior and its punishment changed over the centuries? What were early prisons like? What were the duties of a turn-key? Find out all this and more in The Devil Made Me Do It.<P style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt> <P style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt>Drawing on early court dockets, diaries, sermons, gaolers' records, and other primary sources, Juliet Haines Mofford investigates historical cases from a time when accused felons often pleaded in their own defense: The Devil made me do it! <P style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt> <P style=MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt>Among the questions that emerge in this fascinating book: Would spinster Sarah Booker be punished today for her 1769 theft of three skeins of linen yarn? Would Joan Andrews still get a T for Theft pinned upon her bodice for cheating a client by placing two stones in the firkin of butter she sold him?
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-222) and index
Notes Print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed
Subject Crime -- New England -- History -- 17th century
Trials -- New England -- History -- 17th century
Punishment -- New England -- History -- 17th century
HISTORY -- General.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Criminology.
Crime
Punishment
Trials
SUBJECT New England -- History -- 17th century
Subject New England
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2021679170
ISBN 9780762775965
0762775963