Bøker av Mary Beth Norton

A fascinating collection of questions and answers-about courtship, marriage, love, and sex-from a seventeenth-century periodical The Athenian Mercury-a one-page, two-sided periodical published in 1690s London-included the world's first personal advice column. Acclaimed historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Beth Norton's "I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer" is a remarkable collection of questions and answers drawn from this groundbreaking publication. In these exchanges, anonymous readers look for help with their most intimate romantic problems-about courting, picking a spouse, getting married, securing or avoiding parental consent, engaging in premarital sex and extramarital affairs, and much more. Spouses ask how to handle contentious marriages and tense relationships with in-laws. Some correspondents seek ways to ease a conscience troubled by romantic and sexual misbehavior. The lonely wonder how to meet a potential partner-or how to spark a warmer relationship with someone they already have an eye on. And both men and women inquire about how to extract themselves from relationships turned sour. Many of these concerns will be familiar to readers of today's advice columns. But others are delightfully strange and surprising, reflecting forgotten social and romantic customs and using charmingly unfamiliar language in which, for example, "kissing is a luscious diet," a marriage might provide "much love and moderate conveniency," and an "amorous disposition" can lead to trouble. Delightful and entertaining, "I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer" provides a unique, intriguing, and revealing picture of what has-and hasn't-changed over the past three centuries when it comes to love, sex, and relationships.

In this pioneering study of the ways in which the first settlers defined the power, prerogatives, and responsibilities of the sexes, one of our most incisive historians opens a window onto the world of Colonial America. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Mary Beth Norton tells the story of the Pinion clan, whose two-generation record of theft, adultery, and infanticide may have made them our first dysfunctional family. She reopens the case of Mistress Ann Hibbens, whose church excommunicated her for arguing that God had told husbands to listen to their wives. And here is the enigma of Thomas, or Thomasine Hall, who lived comfortably as both a man and a woman in 17th century Virginia. Wonderfully erudite and vastly readable, Founding Mothers & Fathers reveals both the philosophical assumptions and intimate domestic arrangements of our colonial ancestors in all their rigor, strangeness, and unruly passion."An important, imaginative book. Norton destroys our nostalgic image of a 'golden age' of family life and re-creates a more complex past whose assumptions and anxieties are still with us."--Raleigh News and Observer

Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in this startlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study. In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony's leaders, defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered how God's people could be suffering at the hands of savages. Struck by the similarities between what the refugees had witnessed and what the witchcraft "victims” described, many were quick to see a vast conspiracy of the Devil (in league with the French and the Indians) threatening New England on all sides. By providing this essential context to the famous events, and by casting her net well beyond the borders of Salem itself, Norton sheds new light on one of the most perplexing and fascinating periods in our history.

A bold genealogy of gender in the Anglo-American public sphere from the 1640s to the 1760s.

First published in 1980 and recently out of print, Liberty's Daughters is widely considered a landmark book on the history of American women and on the Revolution...