01: Colonization

Cases like Elizabeth Key’s help highlight the ways in which justifications for discriminatory practices were built over time, and the fluidity of status and freedom for people of African descent in early colonial Virginia. She initially lost her case because she and her son were classified by the court as “Negroes,” but was able to win by highlighting her father’s whiteness and her Christian faith.

a law was passed by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony requiring a five-shilling fine from anyone caught "observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way."

In Locke’s writings we witness the birth of liberal social theory, which posits the autonomous independent individual as the center of the social universe, for whom social and political institutions are self-willed constructs whose purpose and function are to secure the rights and interests of self-seeking individuals.

Government only protects life, liberty, and property. It keeps peace and order in a voluntaristic, individualistic society.

Without this work, John Winthrop’s will be the only story told in textbooks about this country’s colonial history. Instead, the <em>Records of the Governor and Company </em>allow us to teach other realities, like that of the unnamed Indian woman who was coerced into sex by John Dawe. The Puritan freemen may have the loudest voices in the archive, but theirs are not the only narratives being told.