Devil Made Me Do It!: Crime and Punishment in Early New England

Tales of the country’s original criminals—and how the courts punished them for their misdeeds



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 li...