New Books In Public Policy

  In early America, the practice of “warning out” was unique to New England, a way for the community to regulate those who might fall into poverty and need assistance from the town or province. Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) is the first book about this forgotten aspect of colonial Massachusetts life since 1911. We perambulate with him around Boston’s streets on the eve of the Revolution. Dayton and Salinger present the legal basis of the warning system and the moral, religious and humanistic motives of those who enforced it. We interview legal historian Cornelia H. Dayton of the University of Connecticut about the book she wrote with fellow historian Sharon V. Salinger, of the University of California, Irvine. They discovered his “diary,” and from there found warrants and other documents that allowed them to reconstruct his world, as well as the biographies of the sojourners, soldiers, and members of ethnic and religious minoritie