Editorial

AT the close of our 98th volume, we are pleased to present the first winner of the Margaret Fuller Prize, an honor to be awarded annually to the best submitted essay in literary studies on a New England topic in any period. This essay focuses on the Ohio-born author Charles Chesnutt but, through a careful study of the internal readers’ reports used to evaluate manuscripts for publication at the Boston firm Houghton Mifflin, illuminates the role of the New England publishing industry in shaping the fin-de-siècle literary canon. We are honored to promote the work of these scholars, Kenneth Price, Stephanie P. Browner, Lauren Millhorn, and Antje Anderson, on The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive, a digital project making Chesnutt's oeuvre available to a wide audience. We are grateful to patrons of the Quarterly for supporting the Margaret Fuller Prize and also to the selection committee, comprised of members of our Editorial Board, Board of Directors, and editorial staff.This issue features three additional essays, two concerning colonial New England and one examining an instrumental interpretation of that history in the early 20th century. Though centuries separate their objects of study, essays by Christopher Trigg and Satoru Kimura explore the ascription of liberal religious values to the region's founders and the import of this question to discourses of American exceptionalism. Andrew Juchno's study of “distraction” in the statutes of Massachusetts Bay makes an important contribution at the intersection of legal history and disability studies.Thank you for reading.