The book explores the cultural and intellectual worlds of the hustling promoters, battling historians, Catholic missionaries, Native American ritual specialists, learned theologians, religious dissenters, magistrates, and governors who clashed and intermingled in the opening decades of colonization and resistance to it. Ranging from the eastern settlements to the western missions of early North America, it examines a period when rhetoric and ritual functioned mainly to persuade, entreat, compel, and solicit.