Another Early America: Getting and Begetting in the Chesapeake

Abstract

David Thomas Konig. Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts. Essex County, 1629-1692. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.215 + xxi pp. Aubrey C. Land, Lois Green Carr, and Edward C. Papenfuse, eds. Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. 350 + xvi pp. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds. The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 310 + viii pp. A "new social history" of the early tobacco colonies has been born. The event was celebrated by two conferences held in 1974, each of which has now yielded a substantial volume of updated scholarly essays. It is too early to evaluate this new development, but the initial perspectives and findings are significant in themselves and suggest questions which seem more urgent in the light of the work to date.