Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan or New Canaan

Thomas Morton’s three-volume work, harshly critical of the Puritans and their exploitation of the land and its Indigenous populations, was the first to be banned in what would become the United States of America. Morton devoted one volume to the religion, intelligence, and customs of the Indigenous people he met; another to the region’s natural history; and the third to an unfavorable history of the British colonists. He suggested an approach that involved sharing natural resources, religious tolerance, and equitable trade between the colonists and Indigenous peoples—principles he exercised with his interracial communal settlement of Mount Ma-re (later Merrymount) in present-day Quincy, Massachusetts. “Agents for those of Newe-England” halted the work’s printing in England, the 400 copies later printed in the Netherlands were seized on publication, and the Puritans outlawed it in their colonies. Today there are only 61 known copies.