Editorial

Abstract

I this number, the New England Quarterly proudly announces the publication of the 2021 Colonial Society of Massachusetts Walter Muir Whitehill Prize winning essay, “The Rights of God’s Stewards: Property, Conscience, and the Great Awakening in Canterbury, Connecticut” by Erik Nordbye. The prize recognizes Whitehill’s contributions to the Colonial Society, but at the same time we acknowledge the Colonial Society’s larger contributions to scholarship on early America. Walter Muir Whitehill was, in the words of the New York Times, “one of Boston’s most outspoken champions of historic preservation.” Whitehill presided over the Colonial Society, managed the publication of collections of primary source documents in volumes remarkable for their editorial integrity and beauty—a practice continued, after 1978 by Fredrick Scouller Allis Jr. and, then since 1993, by John Tyler—and laid the foundation for its current programs. The establishment of the Whitehill Prize represents the extension of the Colonial Society’s mission to encourage scholarship on early American history. Readers of this journal know that the prize annually offers an honorarium to an outstanding essay on the early republic (up to 1815) which the Quarterly agrees to publish. A doctoral student in theology at the Harvard Divinity School, Erik Nordbye illustrates the Colonial Society’s support of innovative scholarship. Rather than pursuing the evangelical arguments separating New from Old Light theology, Nordbye correlates institutional and structural attributes of that division with questions about the impact of the contexts of property and possessory rights in shaping the disputes of the Great Awakening and provides us with an unusual view of its