| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Peoples of a Spacious Land: Families and Cultures in Colonial New England. By Gloria L. Main. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv, 316 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-674-00628-3.)

This remarkable synthesis of colonial New England family life is the most comprehensive we have ever had. It is at once a compendium of what we know and a provocation to learn more. Gloria L. Main melds her mastery of the secondary literature with her own wide-ranging research in wills, inventories, diaries, correspondence, court cases, and genealogies. She sets the family culture of the colonists in unfamiliar contexts of social organization, work, gender, and sexuality as well as in the more conventional ones of the life course. She draws on demography, on anthropology, and, insistently, on biology. And she does all this in an animated, even aphoristic, prose worthy of the immensity of her achievement. 1

And yet, her extraordinary synthesis may be, as well, the most equivocal we have ever had. Its equivocality begins at the beginning, in its titular embrace of the Pilgrim justification for taking the land from the Indians because it was "spacious" (that is, empty). It persists to the very end, in its paired concluding chapters on the Narragansetts and the New English, the chapter on the newcomers more than twice as long as the chapter on the natives and the chapter on the natives itself twice as much about the English as about the Indians. And it prevails throughout, in its promise of systematic comparison of invaders and aboriginals and its perfunctory efforts to fulfill that promise. . . .

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