| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall. By Judith S. Graham. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000. xii, 283 pp. $40.00, ISBN 1-55553-445-7.)

The diary of Samuel Sewall, Boston merchant and chief justice of the Superior Court of Judicature, has long been a staple among historians of colonial New England. Covering fifty-five years, it is unsurpassed as a source of information on the rhythms of everyday life in early Boston. Judith S. Graham has mined the diary well in Puritan Family Life. And her conclusions about the Sewall family are, if unremarkable, nevertheless sound: the Sewalls' marriage constituted a "mutually respectful relationship"; he was "very comfortable, confident, and happy in his parental role"; he and Hannah delighted in the "progress of their children"; their children "loved and respected their father (and their mother)." In order to sustain that portrait of domestic tranquility, Graham does two things. First, she traces the life cycle of the Sewall family, beginning with the marriage of Sewall and Hannah Hull in 1676. Second, she dwells on the historiographical context of every point she makes. . . .

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