The 1636-1637 Pequot War and its aftermath were formative events in the making of New England and North America. The region’s first major colonial war eliminated the Pequots as a geopolitical power, opened southern New England to English domination, nearly annihilated the Pequots, and helped to establish patterns of extreme violence against Native Americans that shaped much of the continent north of Mexico. Unsurprisingly, few events in colonial North America have produced such prolonged and unresolved historical debate. This chapter will summarize the ongoing modern Pequot genocide debate, narrate the cataclysm in detail, provide quantitative estimates of its death toll, discuss dispersal and enslavement as a genocidal strategy, reevaluate colonists’ culpability, reconsider pre-genocide Pequot population estimates, and explain how this catastrophe constituted genocide under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.

While there is broad agreement that this country incarcerates too many people, there is a distressing lack of clarity about how to address the problem. At one end of the spectrum are “abolitionists,” who view American criminal law enforcement, like slavery, as an illegitimate institution that can only be abolished, not reformed. Broadly speaking, abolitionists want to get rid of prisons, defund the police, and adopt noncoercive strategies to deal with crime. Or, as Woods Ervin, an organizer with Critical Resistance, a prominent abolitionist organization, explains, “abolition is a political vision with a goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”1 Abolitionists contrast their approach with that of “reformers.” Reformers view the criminal justice system with more optimism or, at least, as a necessary evil. They seek changes to, not the elimination of, existing law enforcement architecture. Abolitionists think reformers are too timid. Reformers think abolitionists are impractical.

This chapter provides empirical analysis of ballot rolloff from 1940-2000. This era featured less partisan conflict than did the eras that came before and after this time period. One result of this is that ballot law changes were less partisan in nature and tended to work to benefit incument politicians. Our data demonstrate that ballot type faciltated growth in the incumbency advantage and produced lawmakers that were more effective at shepherding bills through the legislative process.

Connecticut, Rhode Island, and South Carolina do not use any form of popular election in selecting state judges. Selection is (or was) through either election by the legislature or appointment by the governor. In each of the three states, one or more controversies surrounding either the selection process or serving judges provided the impetus for changes that required persons selected as judges to have been screened and either approved or recommended by a committee or commission. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, the screening body forwards a short list to the selecting authority; in South Carolina, the screening body reviews applications from persons who desire to be on a list of those eligible for appointment in the future. To the extent that partisanship influenced the change process, it was primarily focused on the composition of the screening body rather than on whether there should be such a body.

This chapter demonstrates how New England – an Atlantic region that differed greatly from the Lower South in its origins, climatic characteristics, and demographic make-up – nonetheless found ways to embrace sericulture. The pursuit figured little in corporate or imperial plans, arrived late, and was never really oriented towards export, growing out of the particular preoccupations of a small number of local promoters. But by drawing on the region’s distinctive organisation and networks, considerable progress was made in planting mulberries, and a foundation was laid that would bring rich engagement with silk culture. Through a case study of one particular household’s pursuit of raw silk – that of Rev. Ezra Stiles – we gain access into what Atlantic silk experimentation meant for the many thousands of families who undertook it at one stage or another across the Atlantic world, and the ways in which it affected their domestic spaces and routines. Lastly, although New England silk trials differed in so many respects from others, it was apparent that they nonetheless shared in common an overriding emphasis on the contribution of female labour – something that their more balanced demographics were better able to support than many outposts in the early South.

Connecticut’s Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth were among the most important participants in the War for Independence, the Constitutional Convention, and the First Federal Congress. As well, both served on their state’s Superior Court, and Ellsworth was chief drafter of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and Chief Justice of the United States from 1796–1800. Their religious convictions, informed by Reformed theology, influenced their contributions to the creation of America’s constitutional order, and they represent well the 50–75% of Americans in this era who Calvinists.