Massachusetts Bay Colony Research Articles

Review: Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston by Michael Rawson

Michael Rawson. Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, xii + 367 pp., 29 b/w illus. and 3 tables. $29.95, ISBN 9780674048416 The removal of cows from Boston Common was a burning political issue of 1830. The anti-cow faction saw the 631-acre pasture on the western edge of the Shawmut peninsula as a potential site of leisure, recreation, and refinement. These petitioners often resided in the wealthier adjacent areas of the city. A counter petition emerged from pro-cow advocates who more likely earned their living, in part, from the keeping of animals. Boston’s town council decided in favor of the petition to ban cows; the common people appealed that decision the following year and lost again. This seemingly benign change in agricultural and social practice is presented as a turning point in the attitude of Bostonians to nature in the most important book published in recent years on the city’s nineteenth-century environmental history. Michael Rawson’s Eden on the Charles succinctly summarizes the relevant literature, opens new research territory, and provides a larger context for understanding the human relationship to nature in American cities. The book features five fascinating and interlocking chapters: “Enclosing the Common,” “Constructing Water,” “Inventing the Suburb,” Making the Harbor,” and “Recreating the Wilderness.” An admirer of Raymond Williams’s writings on the social construction of nature, Rawson examines the ways that Bostonians redefined their …

Privacy and Prurience: An Essay on American Law, Religion, and Women

In my studying of American law – in its relation to religion and to privacy and to women – the current bookends of my readings consist of two sets of texts: the first, certain writings from the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony; the second, certain writings from the United States Supreme Court of very recent years. The first set consists of reports and records generated in Massachusetts incident to the Antinomian Controversy of 1836-1838, particularly reports of the trials of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, and accounts of the “monstrous births” of each. The second set includes writings from year 2007: the United States Supreme Court’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (its most recent abortion decision), and the amicus briefs filed therein.Examining and juxtaposing those sets of writings, this essay discloses striking resonances between the 17th-century and the 21st-century texts. It documents in each: religio-judicial prurience in examinations and constructions of female bodies; and disappearance of “privacy” as a protector of women’s autonomy and women’s liberty.

‘Some things spoken I understood not’

This work of poetry, non-fiction, and historical source material deals with the gathering of the first ‘Praying Indian’ congregation at Natick, Massachusetts Bay colony, in 1654. The Reverend John Eliot and one of his Native American translators, possibly John Sassamon, helped guide the Praying Indians through their professions of saving grace, a puritan requirement for full church membership. Before the formal gathering, Eliot's translator and two other Native Americans got drunk and forcefully inebriated the eleven-year-old son of a sachem. This event nearly derailed the church gathering. Most of the events depicted here, and a good part of Eliot's narrative, are a matter of historical record; the rest has grown, through language, momentum, and human logic, from that historical record.

Indians and Images: The Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal, James Printer, and the Anxiety of Colonial Identity

This article examines differing visual iterations of the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal between about 1629 and 1675 and reads them as reflective of the diffuse nature of colonial identity and that identity's complex relationship with Native Americans. The seals are viewed as representations of the ambivalence, fragmentation, and instability that necessarily accompanied the formation of a colonial New World identity. They also expose the colonists' own uncertainty in their control over the colonized Natives, revealing a crack through which Native Americans, particularly transculturated Native Christians, could critique and ultimately disrupt the conviction—and fantasy—of colonial dominance. Topics include the John Foster and Samuel Green printer's cuts of the seal, Homi Bhabha, James Printer (Nipmuck), Christian Indians, and King Philip's War.

Politics in the Archives: Records, Property, and Plantation Politics in Massachusetts Bay, 1642-1650

AbstractThis essay concerns the permutations of English popular politics in its seventeenth-century Atlantic setting, using the record of local and individual experience of politics to examine the process whereby settlers took possession of land in Massachusetts Bay. Historians have long appreciated the importance of English local customs in the early North American settlements, but the explicit political significance of English corporate and manorial approaches to land law in these settlements, and in the expansion of the Massachusetts Bay regime during the 1640s, have not been properly understood. The essay's perspective is microhistorical, developing its case from Obadiah Bruen's detailed "town book" of the Gloucester plantation: the book that he kept as the settlement's recorder between 1642 and 1650. The plantation occupied a key set of coordinates at the junction of English popular politics and religion and the building of the Massachusetts Bay colony during the 1640s. Using a close reading of Bruen's text, the essay identifies a politics of land possession, fashioned from traditional English political forms and their uses of land law, that sustained the Gloucester plantation, much like the colony as a whole, through a decade of bitter internal divisions. In the face of religious conflict and the myriad difficulties of building a new regime, political order came to depend, in Gloucester as in Massachusetts Bay generally, on the power to convey secure title to the possession of land, a power enshrined in the routine administrative records of local notaries or recorders, officially required in each Massachusetts Bay township during the 1640s.

New England, Nonesuch

In 1652, Roger Williams published a book titled The Hireling Ministry None of Christs in London in which he made a theological argument with political implications for the settlement of the New World. “Nations being meerly and essentially civill,” Williams wrote, “cannot (Christianly) be called Christian States, after the patterne of that holy and typical Land of Canaan.” Nations should not think of themselves as “Christian,” that is to say, as favored by God, because, Williams said, the biblical Israel was “a Non-such and an unparalel’d Figure of the Spirituall State of the Church of Christ Jesus, dispersed, yet gathered to him in all Nations” (3). England and its colonies were no second Israel, no exceptions on earth, and no favored nation of God, because there was no parallel for a state’s protection in the New Testament. Members of a nation who made such a claim—much less acted on it—were, as Williams saw it, asking for trouble. The argument was directed at a London audience; Williams was barred from the Puritan-controlled press in the Massachusetts Bay colony, in part for holding ideas such as this one. London, however, was also a center of power that could override colonial controversies and that badly needed spiritual guidance in a time of social upheaval. Williams’s argument depends on close attention to the material conditions of representation. Like many university-trained Protestants of his day, he considered attentiveness to the Bible and a sense of its early linguistic and material history essential to making scriptural interpretations. Like other colonial subjects, he had to assess the marketplace for political controversy to make an effective argument from tiny, distant Providence Plantations. Because Williams positions it at the nexus of material textual histories and a critique of ideas about national entitlement, the notion of the nonesuch seems historiographically fertile. Its most familiar association for today’s readers might be “The Royal Nonesuch”:

The Rise and Fall of the Province of Lygonia, 1643–1658

During the 1640s, George Cleeve and Thomas Morton carved the province of Lygonia out of Ferdinando Gorges' Maine. Cleeve believed Lygonia's legitimacy was guaranteed by its legal standing and by the authority of its Parliamentarian proprietor, but he could not stop Lygonian towns from opting to join the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1658.

Pioneer in the Hardware of Culture: Roger Burlingame’s March of the Iron Men and Engines of Democracy

Pioneer in the Hardware of CultureRoger Burlingame’s March of the Iron Men and Engines of Democracy Howard P. Segal (bio) In teaching the history of technology I have often distributed to my students the appendixes from Roger Burlingame’s March of the Iron Men: A Social History of Union through Invention and its sequel, Engines of Democracy: Inventions and Society in Mature America, books published in 1938 and 1940, respectively. There are two columns, the one on the left headed “Events” and the one on the right headed “Inventions.” March’s initial Event is the “1630 Settlement of Massachusetts Bay Colony,” and the first Invention is the “1634 Sawmill (first American), Maine.” March’s final Events are “1865 Lincoln’s 2d term, Lincoln assassinated, and Lee surrenders,” while the last Invention is the “1865 Web printing press, William Bullock, Pennsylvania.” For Engines, the first and last Events are the “1866 Civil Rights Act” and the “1929 Stock Market collapse”; the first and last Inventions are the “1866 Atlantic cable, Cyrus W. Field, New York; Compressed air rock drill, Charles Burleigh, Massachusetts; and Iron tank cars, Pennsylvania,” and the “1929 Polaroid, Edwin H. Land, Massachusetts.”1 In his preface to March, Burlingame claims to have included “as complete a list of American inventions [and inventors] as has been possible.” Any errors of omission [End Page 426] and commission derive from his admittedly not being among either “professional historians” or “professional technicians.” Engines omits such remarks but offers comparable materials, with the disclaimer of Burlingame having “had to meet the increased difficulties of the technics themselves with an untechnical mind.” Each book, moreover, offers not just an extensive and sometimes annotated bibliography (eighteen and twenty-three pages, respectively) but also a separate “classified index” listing specific fields of invention and individual inventors. I always praise the pioneering approach of these books in connecting political, economic, diplomatic, and military developments with technological developments of the same years. In their day, they had few if any rivals for use in high schools and colleges or with the general public. Despite Burlingame’s disavowal of being a professional historian, Robert C. Post recently reminded us that Mel Kranzberg suggested that he become SHOT’s first president, presumably an affirmation of his respect for Burlingame’s writings on the history of technology.2 Indeed, Mel induced Burlingame to contribute what became the lead article to the very first issue of Technology and Culture, “The Hardware of Culture.” In semiautobiographical style Burlingame recounted themes elaborated on in his histories, noting both the limited number of secondary works available in the 1930s and the special utility of Abbott Payson Usher’s History of Mechanical Inventions (1929) and Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934), “which did what I hoped to do, but on a world scale.” Burlingame concluded that the field was still “relatively empty,” but that it offered “wide opportunity.” “The tools for this all-embracing historiography are rapidly multiplying.”3 Altogether, Burlingame published quite a lot on technology, and not just on American technology. Besides March and Engines, he also wrote the broadly conceived Backgrounds of Power: The Human Story of Mass Production (1949), covering technological developments as far back as ancient Egypt—which he listed in “The Hardware of Culture” as the last of a trilogy along with March and Engines—and Machines That Built America (1953), which summarizes much of those first two volumes. There were also Inventors Behind Inventors (1947) and the complementary Scientists [End Page 427] Behind the Inventors (1960); Dictator Clock: 5000 Years of Telling Time (1966); four biographical studies—Whittling Boy: The Story of Eli Whitney (1941), General Billy Mitchell: Champion of Air Defense (1952), Henry Ford: A Great Life in Brief (1955), and Out of Silence: The Life of Alexander Graham Bell (1964); and Mosquitoes in the Big Ditch (1952), a history of the Panama Canal for juveniles. And there were histories of both the Scribner (1946) and McGraw-Hill (1959) publishing firms which discussed technological as well as editorial, managerial, and financial developments.4 Born in New York City in 1889 to the son of the longtime editor of Scribner’s Magazine—part of the prestigious...

Two Seventeenth-Century Conversion Narratives from Ipswich, Massachusetts Bay Colony

Two extraordinarily rare documents, the seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographies of William and Elisabeth Adams, residents of Ipswich, Massachusetts Bay Colony, are here introduced, transcribed, and annotated. So intense were the couple's spiritual struggles that, at one point, William fears that he might “cut the throat of my own soul.”

Banishment, Jurisdiction, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century New England: The Case of Roger Williams

This essay rereads the works of Roger Williams that pertain to his banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in an effort to uncover not their much-examined religious perspective but their previously unnoticed common-law framework. In their rise to prominence in the early to mid-seventeenth century, certain principles of the common law—including the use of precedent and the law’s responsiveness to changing human needs—Shelped alter many aspects of the law, including the law of jurisdiction, which was of particular relevance to banishment. Indeed, as a result of a proliferation of jurisdictions and a growing uncertainty about the legal boundaries between them, banishment, the essay argues, in the form of a previously unrecognized kind of narrative—what I will call the banishment narrative—came to prominence as an entirely new way of figuring who the early modern, and in particular the white English, colonist really was.

‘How may wee come to serve God?’: Spaces of Religious Utterance in John Eliot's Indian Tracts

In 1671 the Reverend John Eliot imagined the religious conversion of one of Massachusetts Bay's most admired and powerful leaders, Metacom, also known as King Philip and Sachem to the Wampanoag. After much agonising and debate, in this fictional creation Metacom eventually utters these words of conversion:Who can oppose or gainsay the mountainous weight of these arguments? I am more than satisfied. I am ashamed of my ignorance, and I abhor myself that ever I doubted of this point. And I desire wholly to give myself to the knowledge of, and obedience to the Word of God, and to abandon and forsake these sins which the word of God reproveth and condemneth.1Metacom's rejection of tribal affiliation and spirituality in favour of Protestant systems of religion and government is certainly one of Eliot's most fanciful scenes in his fictional rendition of religious conversions in Indian Dialogues. Indeed, in 1675, only a few years after its publication, the conflict commonly referred to as King Philip's War devastated the colony and with that the work of Eliot's mission in New England. Philip led Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuck and some Mohegan tribes in a brutal conflict against colonial settlers in the Massachusetts Bay area. The war, which was sparked off by the death of John Sassamon, a translator for John Eliot but also a close ally of Metacom, was also about land rights and the encroachment of colonial settlements into native territory. King Philip's War lasted approximately one year and was one of the bloodiest battles in American history: houses, villages and towns were razed to the ground, hostages were taken on both sides, and combatants were either killed in battle or tortured and mutilated if taken captive. At the climax of the war in 1676 Metacom met this fate when he was captured and beheaded: his head was placed on a spike and displayed in Plymouth for a number of years, acting as a symbol of colonial power and a deterrent to anyone planning future reprisals. Recent studies, including Jill Lepore's The Name of War, analyse the motivations and tensions which prompted this conflict and estimate that hundreds of settlers were killed, wiping out around half of the colonial settlements, and thousands of Indians were killed or sold into slavery.2One accurate part of Eliot's fictional account of Philip in Indian Dialogues is that this site of mayhem and bloodshed in the Massachusetts Bay area had previously been at the heart of John Eliot's mission and the place where many Algonquians declared their conversion to Christianity. This article considers the conversion narratives of praying Indians as well as other types of religious utterance with attention to the spaces in which speeches and other kinds of religious utterances were delivered. In this analysis space is a physical space, a wigwam, a praying town or the Cambridge synod, for example, but it is also a cultural space where certain power relationships between English and Indian speakers are negotiated. To begin with, a few notes on John Eliot and his mission will provide contextual background for this study of religious utterance by seventeenth-century Christian Indians.John Eliot left England for a new life in the emerging colony of Massachusetts in 1631. He became minister of Roxbury on his arrival in New England and fulfilled his duties towards his congregation until he died in 1690. His life's work and his historical significance as 'Apostle to the Indians' hinges on his creation of praying towns which were exclusively populated by Christian believers among the Algonquian speaking people of the Massachusetts Bay area. The mission officially began in 1629 with the Massachusetts Bay Charter and the Bay Company Seal which pictured the speech of one, solitary Indian by imposing on him the words 'Come over and help us!', invoking the plea of the Macedonians to St Paul, but Eliot's own missionary endeavour, which was one of the most successful and sustained missionary endeavours of the English-speaking colonies, was not underway until 1643. …

Native Americans, Conversion, and Christian Practice in Colonial New England, 1640—1730

Fortunately, the two travelers arrived before sunset. Earlier in the day, on 5 May 1674, John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had set out from Boston for Wamesit, the northernmost of the fourteen Indian “praying towns” within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the one most subjected to retaliatory attacks from raiding bands of Mohawks in the previous few years. Upon safe arrival, the Englishmen greeted their Pennacook friends and gathered as many as they could at the wigwam of Wannalancet, the head sachem of Wamesit, where Eliot, the aging missionary to the Indians, proceeded to talk about the meaning of the parable of the marriage of the king's son in Matthew 22:1—4. Wannalancet, according to Gookin, was a “sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty”; he had from the beginning been “loving and friendly to the English,” and in return they had tried to encourage him to embrace Christianity. Although the English missionaries would have desired him to readily accept the gospel message they preached, Wannalancet voluntarily incorporated Christian practices slowly, over time, without necessarily repudiating his native culture and traditional religious practices.1 For four years Wannalancet “had been willing to hear the word of God preached”; when Eliot or other missionaries made their periodic visits to Wamesit, Wannalancet made sure he was there. Over time, Wannalancet adopted the English practices of keeping the Sabbath, learning to go to any available meeting or instruction, fellowshipping, and refraining from various activities proscribed by the town's praying leaders. Despite all that, however, the English missionaries still complained that he “hath stood off” since he had “not yielded up himself personally.”2

Student Debt and The Spirit of Indenture

When we think of the founding of the early colonies, we usually think of the journey to freedom, in particular of the Puritans fleeing religious persecution to settle the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But it was not so for a majority of the first Europeans who emigrated to these shores. "Between one-half and two-thirds of all white immigrants to the British colonies arrived under indenture," according to the economic historian David W. Galenson, a total of three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand people. Indenture was not an isolated practice but a dominant aspect of labor and life in early America.

The Diary of Horace C. Lee, 1841–1842: (Part 1)

In the diary of Horace C. Lee, 1841-42, a young dry goods clerk in Springfield, Massachusetts, explores both his own emerging ideals as he grows into adulthood and also the complex gender, religious, social, and economic dynamics of a midsize New England town as it develops into a city.1 The sixteen and a half months recorded by Lee in this diary are for him a unique period of transition between childhood and adulthood. His journal therefore provides an intimate, first-person account of adolescent tensions between responsibilities to family and obligations to friends, career and recreation, and courtship and camaraderie. Scratched across the pages of the diary are the traces of his struggle to define his masculinity and independence in a period of middle-class mobility and provincial prosperity for mid-nineteenthcentury New England. Since this context is crucial to his personal development, a brief overview of the historical, social, and economic environments in which Lee finds himself will set the scene.Still caught in the whirl of its own rapid transition from quiet town to bustling city, Springfield in 1841 was an ideal place for a young man in search of opportunity. The town was founded in 1636 by a band of settlers under the leadership of William Pynchon, one of the English Puritans who had founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony just a few years earlier.2 Nestled at the base of an imposing bluff on the eastern shore of the Connecticut River, the primary conduit for sharing goods, people, and information between the major towns of western New England, Springfield developed concurrently with the region throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The major economic advantage for Springfield over its peer settlements, however, came after the Revolution, when the fledgling federal government selected the town in 1794 as the site of the United States Armory.3With the sudden flood of attention from the government and private investors, Springfield burgeoned into a regional hub for manufacturing, business, and transportation. The grounds of the armory were laid out on the bluff, fittingly renamed Armory Hill, above the commercial center of town, which ran along Main Street, parallel to the river. Most of the heavy manufacturing for the armory occurred just south of town, at a complex on the Mill River known as the Watershops; private textile mills and factories quickly sprang up along the Chicopee River to the north in Cabotville. The construction of a railroad depot at the northern end of Main Street connected Springfield first with Worcester and Boston to the east in 1839, then over the river and west with Albany in 1841, and soon with towns north and south along the Connecticut River Valley.4 Quite unexpectedly, Springfield had become a crossroads of the industrial revolution.With the influx of industry, commerce, and culture came new diversity and prosperity to Springfield society. Irish immigrants followed the railroad and settled around the depot,5 free blacks organized a church downtown,6 and young men from throughout New England flocked to the city to launch their mercantile careers from clerking positions in the shops along Main Street. The town developed three distinct neighborhoods: the Street, comprising the original settlement and the commercial center of the town; the Hill, a collection of fine homes clustered around the armory and downhill past the churches and lecture halls of State Street; and the Watershops, where many of the mill workers made their homes. Fierce neighborhood rivalries flourished among the young men, particularly between the new wealth of the Hill boys and the sons of the more established families on the Street.7 More seriously, this new socioeconomic diversity gave rise to a wide variety of beliefs and opinions that often came in conflict.In the first half of the nineteenth century, Springfield was a hothouse of religious sentiment, with offshoot denominations sprouting up routinely every couple of years. …

Women of Faith and the Pen, a transatlantic Reading

‘Women of Faith and the Pen’ asserts that a particular situation existed where the sixteenth-century transatlantic literary marketplace would and indeed did open for female authors who successfully demonstrated three qualities in their writing. The marketplace accepted female authors with an acute Biblical familiarity, the wit to interact with other dynamic authors of their period, and the willingness to make their readers and critics aware of the previous two conditions. Anna Maria van Schurman of the Netherlands, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz of New Spain, and Anne Bradstreet of the Massachusetts Bay Colony all experienced the literary success that came with being identified as a ‘tenth muse,’ a woman of genius and value in her respected culture. This essay opens a conversation about the strategies of these tenth muses and suggests future veins of inquiry to bring writers such as these together across colonial situations.

The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (review)

Reviewed by: The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America patricia p. chu (bio) The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. By Rajini Srikanth. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). In The World Next Door, Rajini Srikanth has kneaded together two different kinds of study. Not content to survey and describe an emerging literature, the author has folded readings of mostly fresh, mostly undiscussed South Asian North American texts into a sustained five-part essay on the roles of writers, readers, scholars, and activists in the current political situation. For her, this new literature requires readers to reconsider their reading habits and to reflect on the habits of Americans in "reading" their nation and others' as texts; such scrutiny is most urgent in the wake of U.S. government responses to the events of September 11. Thus, she engages with debates about the profiling of Muslims, Arabs, and others portrayed as terrorism suspects and about ideas of America and its place in the world. In Asian American studies, she responds to debates about the relative merits of demanding social justice for Asian Americans in the U.S. vs. the task of understanding Asian Americans as global citizens negotiating with racial projections emerging from the nation's rise as a global power. The book does introduce contemporary South Asian cultural texts, but it's not organized around these texts so much as issues raised in reading them. The author questions most of the assumptions that have framed Asian American literary studies, leaving readers with new questions to explore and define this changing terrain. Bibliophiles will rejoice in the dozens of titles, including fiction, poetry, performance art, and plays that Srikanth discusses, including underrepresented Muslim voices. For scholars of Asian American culture "East of California," Srikanth resituates South Asian literature with neither a center nor a margin, but a global web of diasporic communities that touch such places as India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Trinidad, Canada, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. Finally, [End Page 207] for scholars of American culture and womens' studies, Srikanth's book proposes broad questions useful for considering American culture as the U.S. attempts to redefine its role abroad. After explaining her use of the contingent categories, "South Asian American writing" and "North America," Srikanth shifts focus from single sites to the "interconnectedness among nations and peoples," and the interaction between acts of literary writing and reading and transforming the realms of "politics and civic behavior." Quickly sketching the emergence of American awareness of India and the emergence of South Asian America literary texts, Srikanth establishes that her primary focus will be on texts published after Salman Rushdie's watershed novel Midnight's Children (1980). Inveighing against "partial" (biased, incomplete) readings, the author offers two suggestions for "just" readings: a caution against bipolar thinking, and a demand to read "as foreigners to the text," acknowledging our limited knowledge of other cultures. Srikanth cites Bapsi Sidhwa, Tony Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, and Arundhati Roy as writers who explore and appreciate the defining traumas of other nations, a task she feels Americans must undertake if we seek other nations' support. For Srikanth, the prevailing "idea of America" is based on John Winthrop's view, in 1630, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city on the hill" for the world to emulate; she quotes his words as definitive of the future nation's self-image as uniquely favored by God, driven by the desire for religious freedom, equality, and democratic values rather than mere material prosperity, and therefore justified in such acts as massacring "four hundred Pequots during the Pequot War of 1637" (35). Economic motives are typically muted by such ideologues, but, through Benjamin Franklin, are recast as the secular business values of "reason, industry, . . . an eye for the practical," and personal and national self-sufficiency (35), setting the stage for U.S. exceptionalism in the twenty-first century. Srikanth then contrasts this image of America's uniqueness with the complex webs of connection in Amitav Ghosh's memoir/history/novel, In an Antique Land, which links twelfth- and twentieth-century exchanges between Egypt and India with Iraq's 1990 invasion of...

Jamestown Redivivus: An Interview with James Horn

6 Historically Speaking March/April 2007 Jamestown Redivivus: An Interview with James Horn Conducted by RandallJ. Stephens JAMES HORN IS O'NEILL DIRECTOR OF THE JOHN D. ROCKefellerjr . Library at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation andlectureratthe College of William andMary. He is the author of numerous books and articles on colonialAmerica, includingAdapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeendi-Centary Chesapeake (University of North Carolina Press, 1994). A social historian, Horn has analysed colonialsociety within the broader context of the 17th-century Anglophone world. He is abo the editor of thejust-published Library of America's edition ofJohn Smith's works. His most recentwork is A Land As God Made It:Jamestown and die Birth of America (BasicBooks, 2005). Historian Camilla Townsend, Rutgers University, describes this study as a "grandeffort . "Horn "brings togethertheperspectives of recentgenerations of scholars in this relatively brief andhighly readable book. " (William and Mary Quarterly 63 [2006]: 597). Horn is currently workingon a history of the lostRoanoke colony. Historically Speaking assonate editorRandallStephens spoke with Horn in October2006. Randall Stephens: How prominent is Jamestown in the American popular imagination? James Horn: The history of Jamestown has been almost completely overshadowed by die history of Plymouth. If you took a straw poll, I bet you'd probably find that whereas most Americans have heard of die Mayflower and die Pilgrims , far fewer would know much, if anytiiing, aboutJamestown. Stephens: Did 19th-century American historians have something to do with this? Horn: I trace it back to the late 18th century. Sectional rivalries, particularly between Virginia and Massachusetts , existed already in the 1780s. But, of course, the Civil War was what really clinched it for New England. As a consequence of die Soudi losing die war, die New England founding myth became established as die nation's beginning, taught to millions of school children in dieir textbooks and celebrated annually at Thanksgiving. The victors tend to write the dominant version of history, and so Jamestown was largely forgotten. Stephens: Yet the story ofPocahontas and John Smith seems to occupy an important place in the American imagination. Horn: Absolutely. But it seems to me that die story of Smith and Pocahontas is somewhat divorced fromJamestown. The location is early Virginia, but the theme is a romance that has litde to do widi reality . Pocahontas was only 11 or 12 when they first met. Smith was not in love widi her and she was not in love with him. The true story of Pocahontas, at least as far as die English were concerned, is one of redemption. The fact that she converted to Christianity and joined die Anglican Church was evidence "John Smith Takes the King Of Paspaheg Prisoner," in John Smith, The Generali Historie of Virginia , New-England, and the Summer lies (London, 1624). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. (the English believed) diat Indians could be redeemed and brought to the true faith as well as, in time, to English ways. An overlooked aspect of early Virginia was the genuine effort on the part of the English to convert Indians to Christianity. It is a misconception to see Massachusetts as the "religious" colony and Virginia as die "greedy" colony. Stephens: What are some other misconceptions about Jamestown? Horn: It is a mistake to see Jamestown as a failure. Jamestown did not fail; it survived and was ultimately successful. Jamestown's survival was pardy a result of the determined efforts of the settlers and die support of the Virginia Company of London, die colony's sponsor, and pardy a matter of luck. But the fact diat it didsurvive had consequences for die rest of the colonial period and ultimately, Fd say, for die later development of the United States. Stephens: What kinds of consequences ? Horn: Think about what might have happened hadJamestown collapsed . If the English had abandoned the Chesapeake region, would Plymouth have been settled? (Prior to their arrival in North America, the Pilgrims were involved in negotiations widi die Virginia Company, from whom they received permission to settle in die northern part of the colony, near the Hudson River). Similarly, would the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have gone to New England if there hadn...

John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker (review)

Reviewed by: John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker Jay Robert Stiefel (bio) John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker. By Morrison H. Heckscher with the assistance of Lori Zabar. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 225. Illustrations. Cloth, $75.00.) John Townsend was a perfectionist. His elegant and restrained furniture was constructed from the choicest mahogany by methods so refined that reinforcement and precision were lavished even on internal areas not [End Page 670] visible in the finished article. A fifth-generation American and third-generation Newporter, Townsend "lived his life below the level of historical scrutiny," with the only documentary record of his existence being his will, probate inventory, some sparse business records, and an occasional reference to his holding public office (51). His signed and often dated pieces, thirty-four extant at last count, have helped to preserve his legacy. Townsend's accomplishments have now been chronicled in a work as fastidiously crafted as his own. John Townsend, Newport Cabinetmaker complements the exhibition of his furniture held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. Both are the creation of Morrison H. Heckscher, chair of its American Wing. The work compiles recent scholarship about Townsend, offers new interpretations, and assembles them in a narrative format accessible to both layman and expert. Heckscher's catalogue illustrates "all known documented examples of John Townsend's furniture" with full-page, precisely lit, color photographs, often with smaller images highlighting design, construction and, where present, signatures and labeling (73). Each catalogue entry is sparsely written. Measurements, provenance, and bibliographic references are provided; but there are no condition reports, unlike in Heckscher's earlier classic, American Furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Scholars' appetites will be otherwise sated by the detailed appendices. Preceding the catalogue are the historical chapters, which are interspersed with images of furniture that introduce the reader to the work of Townsend and his contemporaries. After an initial chapter that pays homage to earlier researchers and summarizes their contributions, Heckscher describes Newport's position within the constellation of colonial American woodworking centers, particularly Boston. Heckscher believes that the "independent course" chartered by Newporters in renouncing the Puritan leadership of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is evidenced in their furniture design. "Boston innovation," according to Heckscher, was "transformed into something altogether richer and more memorable" by Newport joiners (17–18). While not disputing this achievement in furniture design, it is fair to observe that Newport never fully departed from the baroque influences received from Boston. Indeed, the very persistence of Newport's furniture designs, such as the block-and-shell bureau tables that Townsend produced starting c. 1760, seems decidedly retardaire in the 1790s. Newport neither developed the variety of Boston's blockfront designs [End Page 671] nor adopted the rococo influences popular in other American furniture-making centers, such as Philadelphia. Townsend's signed pieces have the following in common: "[A] fully developed form, a crispness and sharpness of design, a precision of execution, inside and out, and a preference for complex, labor-intensive methods of construction. They are the work of a passionate perfectionist, constitutionally unable to cut corners or economize even in places that cannot be seen" (52). He was a specialist in certain "elaborate and costly" forms. His signing and dating of these pieces establishes their chronology and, according to Heckscher, demonstrate that Townsend "exhibited a self-conscious sense of his own place in the history of cabinetmaking that is unique in the annals of American cabinetmaking" (56). This interpretation of Townsend's motive in labeling his work is one of the most intriguing claims in Heckscher's book, and one of its most problematic. However "self-conscious" Heckscher may suppose Townsend to have been about his stature in cabinetmaking history, there is nothing "unique" about American joiners and cabinetmakers signing and even dating their work. By way of example, substantial bodies of signed and dated work survive for Townsend's contemporaries John Shaw of Annapolis and Benjamin Frothingham of Charlestown, Massachusetts. Another Charlestown cabinetmaker, Jacob Forster, expedited the process by utilizing labels printed with incomplete dates (e.g., "179_"), allowing him to fill in the last digit as...

Out of Her Place: Anne Hutchinson and the Dislocation of Power in New World Politics

seventeenth-century woman used voice freely and forcefully and, as a result, was destroyed by political maneuvering. However, before looking at the colonial American communal structures that could lead to the demise of the renowned Antinomian, Anne Hutchinson, it is helpful to turn briefly to the words of a contemporary woman with a powerful voice. The 2004 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, argues in a New York Times interview that modern women remain trapped in just the kind of double bind that Hutchinson falls into when it comes to success. Jelinek maintains that if women win public acclaim, they lose their sexual appeal and, consequently, a large degree of their social influence. The interviewer asks how Jelinek can espouse such dated stereotypes when [she herself is] acclaimed for [her] intellect. The author responds: A woman is permitted to chat or babble, but speaking in public with authority is still the greatest transgression .... woman's artistic output makes monstrous to men if she does not know how to make herself small at the same time and present herself as a commodity. At best people are afraid of her (31). Jelinek's words resonate with the following story and the lenses which are used to make sense of it, for Hutchinson is the quintessential transgressor in colonial America: unwilling to merely chat or babble, incapable of making herself small, and repeatedly framed in terms of monstrosity by detractors. Unfortunately, Hutchinson did not meet with what Jelinek asserts is the best possible outcome for a public woman: fear. If merely fear had defined the response to Hutchinson's outspoken role in the Antinomian controversy, then perhaps she would not have faced exile and scholars would be studying writings rather than words filtered through trial transcripts and community leaders' accounts of downfall. The controversy that made Hutchinson famous unfolded in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638 when a group of colonists, deeply dissatisfied with the teachings of several church leaders, began to publicly express their discontent. Hutchinson and others argued that preachers were promoting a covenant of works rather than a covenant of grace, wrongly communicating the idea that an individual could be saved by obedience and duty rather than solely by the redeeming grace of the Holy Spirit. They wanted a clear endorsement of the covenant of grace, which minimizes the value of works; according to the covenant of grace, if the Spirit has not already deemed an individual saved, no act on his or part can rescue the soul to heaven. The reaction inspired by the Antinomians, and especially Hutchinson, quickly evolved into something far more insidious than mere fear, as is often the case when leaders feel threatened. part, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's response to Hutchinson can be attributed to the particular strains on the community: dramatically removed from the comforts of the familiar, striving to survive in a foreign and frankly threatening landscape, and subject to inexperienced rule. As a means of containing their new environs, leaders took a severe approach to civil management, which literary critic Phillip Round specifically links to a colonial impulse to control women's voices: In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where the governing class's efforts to establish religious orthodoxy and discursive hegemony were directly related to their handling of women's voices, the situation surrounding women's discourse became particularly crucial. recent years it has come to be generally accepted that New England male elites sought social status, self-understanding, and village order through their manipulation of women's voices, both in public and in print (108). It may be true that controlling women became tantamount to political success in the New World project, but one must consider another facet of the dynamic that could lead to Hutchinson's demise. …

The Disinvestment in Public Higher Education

America's rise in the World has many reasons. One of the most siginificant is upper mobility. Americans are not limited by caste, class, ethnic background, national origin, religion, race, skin color, accent, or gender. The key to success for most Americans is a system of higher education par excellence. Education was viewed as one of the distinguishing characteristics of the New World. Harvard was initially funded by a grant from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. America led the world in mandating secondary education. Public univesities have existed for over two centuries in America, led by the chartering of the University of North Carolina in 1789. The concept of land grants to fund education originated with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and Benjamin Franklin the University of Pennsylvania. The Morrill Act of 1862 created the public land grant universities, which became the core of the public higher education system in most states. Subsequent acts furthered public higher education. The combination of the exisiting public universities and the land grant institutions marked the ascendancy of public higher education outside the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. The post-World War II boom in public funding for higher education resulted in changing the paradigm from one of elitism to that of universal access. Scores of public institutions, especially the masters and community colleges, opened their doors. From the days of their formation, many of the public institutions led the way in offering affordabiltiy and accessibility to higher education for their residents, and in opening their doors to women students as well as racial and religious minorities. They soon added professional schools to their offerings. That was then. State spending on higher education is discretionary and is increasingly being squeezed by mandates, especially medicaid. Periodic budget crisis further reduce state spending; the early part of the New Millenium was especially devastating to the finances of the public institutions. Large tuition increses coupled with substantial budget cuts, curricular cuts, and matriculation of high tuition, non-residents to offset the budget cuts is threatening accessibility and affordability, especially at the flagship universities. Michigan, for example, is now a quasi-private university.