The Class of '35

Abstract

The m.o. known as cohort analysis has been both popular and successful for generations. Eminent scientists, tweedy scholars, downtown artistes, and Grub Street hacks have all frequently employed the method, often to powerful effect. It is this method that links Boston University doctors and Howard Chudacoff, John Updike and Michael Apted, and, alas, David Wallechinsky and Michael Medved. Indeed, examples abound of researchers, writers and artists, who, in tracing individuals, groups, classes, or entire communities over time, have ensnared and implicated readers and viewers in the stories they wish to tell. Whether one is interested, let us say, in Framingham hearts and lungs or residential mobility in Omaha, the career paths of English children, Harry Angstrom's sexual adventures, or, gasp, the 1965 senior class at Palisades High, cohort analysis has proven a tried-and-true narrative strategy and method of research design. Alison Games attempts to employ this method in Migration and the Origins of the English World, offering readers a fascinating, albeit messy, incomplete, and statistically non-representative account of the fates and fortunes of almost 5,000 people (4,878, to be more precise) who quit London for England's American colonies in 1635. Both the virtues and limitations of this important first book suggest much about the opportunities and pitfalls awaiting those who take the plunge into the murky waters of early modern history. Given how hot the history approach, or, more accurately, framework is these days, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the wee beginnings of the Atlantic world. Indeed, most scholars employing the conceit proceed under the assumption that the entire worldminimally defined as western Europe, western Africa, and the Americaswas integrated, perhaps even unitary in character during (throughout?) the early modern period, and that this world ipso facto can best be studied tout ensemble rather than in a fractional way, which is to say, via strict imperial ties,