The ways that sexual activity, ideas about race, and the construction of class sensibilities influenced each other are the central concerns of Kirsten Fischer's Suspect Relations. Focusing on the experiences of ordinary people rather than the colonial elite, she uses court records and travel literature to study how the sexual conduct of Native Americans, Anglo-Americans, and African Americans, and public responses to that conduct influenced the construction of race and class consciousness in northeastern North Carolina during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.