A New England Town: The First Hundred Years

This book shows me how it was back in that time and helps me to understand my ancestors.

Kenneth Lockridge's "A New England Town" is the most informative book I have read in several years. I bought it because it chronicles the founding and development of Dedham, the town in which my ancestors settled upon their arrival in America in the late 1630s, and where my particular forebears lived until 1736, when they moved from Medfield (originally part of Dedham) to Sturbridge. Some descendants of my forebears may yet live in Dedham. The book shows the utopian, corporative, and authoritarian beginnings of the town and their slow (and not always obvious or totally harmful) disintegration over the first one hundred years of its existence. It makes clear the reasons that finally forced younger people to leave the town and why my ancestor moved to Sturbridge -- which some of his descendants left years later for the same reasons: land and opportunity. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the development of New England and the slow move of our population to the West.A New England Town : The First Hundred Years : Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (Norton Essays in American History)

"A New England Town" is a fascinating exploration of the evolution of Dedham, Massachusetts, from its founding as a haven for English Puritans in 1636 over its first century. An example of the local historical investigations in vogue during the latter 1960s, in which the author teases out details about an individual community but effectively draws linkages to broader concerns and themes, Kenneth Lockridge offered a compelling portrait of colonial life, society, economics, and politics in New England. Lockridge is a follower of the French Annales School most identified with Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Ferdinand Braudel which seeks to shift the focus from conventional historical themes and methods toward comprehensive human activity and large-scale social change over long periods of time. "A New England Town" carries out this task quite effectively. Most importantly, Lockridge explodes the myth of the democratic New England town in which resolute Yeoman farmers and common tradesmen made the laws in a consensus manner. What we find is that while Dedham started as a utopian, communal experiment, it quickly evolved into something else as competing world views demolished Puritan hegemony. In that conflict all parties had to ensure that the rights of the minority were not trampled upon. In an irony too great to ignore, Lockridge documents how political conflict fostered the rise of democratic institutions as bulwarks against oppression. It was the second and third generations of Dedham's inhabitants who created this system, and ensured minority protection, not the original Puritans who founded the town. I first read "A New England Town" in graduate school in the latter 1970s and was impressed with what seemed its exceptionally fresh approach, both in terms of methodology (heavily demographic), and perspective (the Annales school). Having just reread the work, I find that it remains an important benchmark in the historiography of colonial North America and Puritanism. I recommend it as a foundational work on the subject.