"With few exceptions, sex is noticeably absent from popular histories chronicling colonial and Revolutionary America. Moreover, it is rarely associated specifically with early American men. This is in part because sex and family have traditionally been associated with women, while politics and business are the historic province of men. But Thomas Foster turns this conventional view on its head. Through the use of court records, newspapers, sermons, and private papers from Massachusetts, he shows that sex - the behaviors, desires, and identities associated with eroticism - was a critical component of colonial understanding of the qualities considered befitting for a man."--Jacket.