Welcome, Kristin Olbertson!

We're very pleased to have Kristin A. Olbertson with us as a guest blogger in the month of July.  Professor Olbertson is an Associate Professor at Alma College, the holder of a J.D. and a Ph.D from the University of Michigan, a historian of colonial America and of US constitutional and legal history, and the author of The Dreadful Word: Criminal Speech and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690-1776, published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press in Studies in Legal History, the books series of the American Society for Legal History.  "The first comprehensive study of criminal speech in eighteenth-century New England," The Dreadful Word "traces how the criminalization, prosecution, and punishment of speech offenses in Massachusetts helped to establish and legitimate a social and cultural regime of politeness."  Based on her reading of statutes and hundreds criminal prosecutions, Professor Olbertson argues that "colonists transformed their understanding of speech offenses from fundamentally ungodly to primarily impolite."  In the process, "a distinct cadre of politely pious men " came to define themselves "largely in contrast to the vulgar, the impious, and the unmanly."

Some endorsements:

“Olbertson reveals how, prior to the Revolution, prosecution of speech misbehavior increasingly marked the boundaries between the refined and the vulgar. Convictions (and acquittals) for threats, contempt, defamation, and false reports distinguished the 'lower sort' from their 'betters'. Slowly but surely, Massachusetts judges and juries gave greater weight to sensibility, civility, and credibility as markers of distinction, while moving away from prosecuting sinful speech and toward defining genteel masculinity. A tour de force.”

Sally E. Hadden, Western Michigan University

“Olbertson builds on two generations of scholarship that have taught us to understand New England's legal culture as enmeshed with English notions of hierarchy. She transforms our understanding by her relentless and pointed focus on the ways speech offences were, for a time at least, integral to governance. A witty and beautifully researched study of how, in a time and place that prized sincerity and restraint and deference, noise and irreverence were everywhere.”

Hendrik Hartog, author of The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North

 “Kristin Olbertson has given us a wide-ranging, wonderfully textured, and deeply insightful exploration of how generations of elites in early Massachusetts reinforced their identity and patrolled the boundaries of the status they claimed by criminalizing the speech of people they deemed their inferiors or who might challenge their authority. The Dreadful Word is a masterly accomplishment that teaches us not simply to see the past with new understanding, but to hear it, as well.”

Bruce H. Mann, Harvard Law School

Welcome, Kristin!

--Dan Ernst