Critical Praise

"The Naked Quaker lays bare Colonial justice through the colorful tales of a woman accused of witchcraft because chickens died after she passed by, a man named Bacon charged with stealing pigs, a semi-literate sailor whose sentence for illegally selling wine included serving as a constable . . . . Court TV is no match!"

—Laurie Beckelman, President, Women’s National Book Association

"Diane Rapaport's The Naked Quaker is a marvel of New England storytelling. Highly entertaining and grounded in the best scholarship, it leaves a new and lasting impression of true crimes and other incidents in the colonial period."

—D. Brenton Simons, President and CEO, New England Historic Genealogical Society

"Diane Rapaport's use of early court records is ingenious. With careful reading of these overlooked archives, she brings life to dozens of little known individual stories. Read together, they add dimension to our understanding of the rigors of daily life in colonial New England."

—Megan Sniffen-Marinoff, Harvard University Archivist

"We 21st century citizens seem to pride ourselves on inventing vice, but as the true (and frequently peculiar) stories in The Naked Quaker reveal, we’ve got nothing on our raucous ancestors! You’ll enjoy reading this book as much as your favorite, guilty-pleasure tabloid, but will look eminently more respectable doing so!"

—Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, co-author of Trace Your Roots with DNA, co-founder of Roots Television, and Chief Family Historian of Ancestry.com