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below Close(X) Browse Results For: Common Law and the Rhetoric
of Social Exclusion in Early New England A community is defined
not only by inclusion but also by exclusion. Seventeenth-century
New England Puritans, themselves exiled from one society,
ruthlessly invoked the law of banishment from another: over
time, hundreds of people were forcibly excluded from this
developing but sparsely settled colony. Nan Goodman suggests
that the methods of banishment rivaled—even
overpowered—contractual and constitutional methods of inclusion
as the means of defining people and place. The law and rhetoric
that enacted the exclusion of certain parties, she contends, had
the inverse effect of strengthening the connections and
collective identity of those that remained. Banished
investigates the practices of social exclusion and its
implications through the lens of the period's common law. For
Goodman, common law is a site of negotiation where the concepts
of c