| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.2

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.2 | The History Cooperative

BOOK REVIEWS

The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America. By John Fea. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 272 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, index. $39.95.)

John Fea has written an excellent cultural biography of Philip Vicker Fithian's relatively short but interesting life. Fithian is best known to scholars for his insightful journal comments on his experiences as a tutor in plantation Virginia, but Fea offers a well-crafted study that makes good use of Fithian's voluminous journals, diaries, and papers, beginning with his early agricultural journal in 1766 and ending with his premature death as an army chaplain in 1775. Fithian was born into a middling family in southwestern New Jersey, and we learn through his accounts about some of the key events of the third quarter of the eighteenth century: the state of prospering yeoman and the seasonal cycles of rural life, the state of Presbyterian religion and American Protestantism in the post—Great Awakening era, the evolving struggle from resistance to revolution in the colonial crisis with Great Britain, and the Enlightenment as experienced in local communities and by ordinary residents of British North America. Fea's "study of this ordinary farmer" situates Fithian in the locale of Cohansey, even as he explains how the young minister achieved a cosmopolitan worldview through his education, his travels to backcountry Pennsylvania, his circle of friends, and, most of all, his reading and self-examination (7).

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