From the Editors

Welcome to this "double" issue (nos. 1 and 2) of volume fifteen of The Journal of Early American History.The first part includes two research articles while the second consists of a "special section on early American historiography".We are also pleased to offer out customary array of reviews of books on various "early American" topics.The first of the articles, by Israel Benporat, considers the character of enforcement of biblical adultery laws, especially the Mosaic death penalty, in seventeenth-century New England.Drawing from scriptural sources and influenced by precedents such as Geneva, godly authorities prosecuted adultery as a capital offense as part of their quest to reform the social order of their colonies.This campaign prompted legal developments and theological debates on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the seventeenth century as New Englanders found guilty of adultery ad to contemplate the prospect of execution.Evidentiary issues, jurisdictional questions, and moral qualms, though, often stayed the imposition of this ultimate sanction.Nevertheless, Benporat argues, the rarity of executions suggests that the death penalty acted as a deterrence and so as a significant contribution to the campaign to impose moral standards rather than as evidence of failure in the so-called Puritan reformation of manners.The second article, by Cody Nager, considers the vexed question of migration and borders in terms of the circumstance by which the territorial growth of the young United States absorbed pre-existing (non-Native) communities.These colonists presented a conundrum: were they subject to the standard naturalization process or were they considered American citizens due to the treaties that incorporated the territory on which they happened to reside?Debates over this issue originated with the 1794 Jay Treaty and reached their zenith following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.The Jay Treaty debate established battle lines, but the small number of residents ensured tensions were subsumed into late 1790s politics.The larger population and racial diversity of the "acquired" inhabitants of Louisiana, though, reinvigorated arguments for treaty-based