New York Times Editors’ Choice Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize Winner of the Gotham Book Prize Winner of the New York Society Library's New York City Book Award Journal of the American Revolution Book of the Year Winner of the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Legal History Winner of the James Bradford Best Biography Prize A riveting Revolutionary Era drama of the first published rape trial in American history and its long, shattering aftermath, revealing how much has changed over two centuries—and how much has not On a moonless night in the summer of 1793 a crime was committed in the back room of a New York brothel—the kind of crime that even victims usually kept secret. Instead, seventeen-year-old seamstress Lanah Sawyer did what virtually no one in US history had done before: she charged a gentleman with rape. Her accusation sparked a raw courtroom drama and a relentless struggle for vindication that threatened both Lanah’s and her assailant’s lives. The trial exposed a predatory sexual underworld, sparked riots in the streets, and ignited a vigorous debate about class privilege and sexual double standards. The ongoing conflict attracted the nation’s top lawyers, including Alexander Hamilton, and shaped the development of American law. The crime and its consequences became a kind of parable about the power of seduction and the limits of justice. Eventually, Lanah Sawyer did succeed in holding her assailant accountable—but at a terrible cost to herself. Based on rigorous historical detective work, this book takes us from a chance encounter in the street into the sanctuaries of the city’s elite, the shadows of its brothels, and the despair of its debtors’ prison. The Sewing Girl's Tale shows that if our laws and our culture were changed by a persistent young woman and the power of words two hundred years ago, they can be changed again. Includes photographs

Finalist for the 2004 Frederick Douglass Prize A century after the Pilgrims' landing, the ongoing interactions of conquered Indians, English settlers, and enslaved Africans in southern New England had produced a closely interwoven, though radically divided, colonial society. In Bodies Politic, John Wood Sweet argues that the coming together of these diverse peoples profoundly shaped the character of colonial New England, the meanings of the Revolution in the North and the making of American democracy. Grounded in a remarkable array of original sources—from censuses and newspapers todiaries, archival images, correspondence, and court records—this innovative and intellectually sweeping work excavates the dramatic confrontations and subtle negotiations by which Indians, Africans, and Anglo-Americans defined their respective places in early New England. Citizenship, as Sweet reveals, was defined in meeting houses as well as in court houses, in bedrooms as well as on battlefields, in medical experiments and cheap jokes as well as on the streets. The cultural conflicts and racial divisions of colonial society not only survived the Revolution but actually became more rigid and absolute in the early years of the Republic. Why did conversion to Christianity fail to establish cultural common ground? Why did the abolition of slavery fail to produce a more egalitarian society? How did people of color define their places within—or outside of—the new American nation? Bodies Politic reveals how the racial legacy of early New England shaped the emergence of the nineteenth-century North—and continues, even to this day, to shape all our lives.