"New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates, if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her 'city on a hill' with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England"--

Ana Schwartz is assistant professor of English at University of Texas at Austin.