The View from New England: Notes on Everyday Life in Rural America to 1850

Abstract

THESE ARE THE NOTES OF A REGIONAL HISTORIAN OF EVERYDAY RURAL life. Their scope is both constrained and perhaps given some concreteness by the nature of my nonacademic employment. As a historian whose work supports program and interpretation at Old Sturbridge Village, an outdoor museum of New England rural life, my primary task has been less to define a field of inquiry than to explore a rural culture and society bounded in time and space. The road map of the subject that I have been asked to provide may be more like the directions given to early travelers in rural America-a description of the major landmarks they will encounter, a sketch of the roads around my own village, and a somewhat battered compass for charting their own paths. In one sense, the history of everyday life has been regarded as what is left over after all the important things have been studied. When real history was defined as past politics, economic and social history were simply grab bags of quotidian details. But as increasingly wide ranges of past human activity have come under academically specialized scrutiny, everyday life has begun to seem a serious subject. The study of the family, of the small community, of work, of women, of the landscape, of production and consumption, of education, of architecture, and of material culture partially encompasses the history of everyday life and partially transcends it. In trying to answer questions about rural New England life from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, I have worked at various times within the sources and literature of all these inquiries. Studies of everyday life aim to construct accounts of how life was put together and how that pattern changed over time-accounts of the routines, environments, possessions, experiences, techniques, and interactions of ordinary people at reasonably well-defined places and times. The study of everyday rural life is not distinguished by the uniqueness of its sources or methodologies, but