Populating her 'city on a hill' with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Ana Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England.

"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. 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"--