<DIV><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><B>Tales of the country's original criminals—and how the courts punished them for their misdeeds</B></P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><B></B> </P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">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 like? What were the duties of a turn-key? Find out all this and more in <I>The Devil Made Me Do It.</I></P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Drawing on early court dockets, diaries, sermons, gaolers' records, and other primary sources, Juliet Haines Mofford investigates historical cases from a time when accused felons often pleaded in their own defense: “The Devil made me do it!”</p><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Among the questions that emerge in this fascinating book: Would spinster Sarah Booker be punished today for her 1769 theft of three skeins of linen yarn? Would Joan Andrews still get a T for Theft pinned upon her bodice for cheating a client by placing two stones in the firkin of butter she sold him?</DIV>