| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Erik R. Seeman. Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England. (Early America: History Context, Culture.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 263. $36.00.

Thirty-five years ago, a young Darrett B. Rutman's manifesto for the new social history attacked the intellectual history that had dominated New England studies during the previous generation ("The Mirror of Puritan Authority," in George A. Billias, ed., Law and Authority in Colonial America: Selected Essays [1965], pp. 149–167). By focusing on the writings of the articulate few, Rutman charged, intellectual historians had created an image of an ordered, cohesive "Puritan" society that bore little relation to the realities of colonial New England. He called historians away from the comfortable perusal of sermons and tracts and pointed them toward the heroic drudgery of culling town and church records. The intellectual framework reconstructed by Perry Miller and his ilk might be a valid expression of the ideals of the elite, Rutman conceded. But he insisted that attention must be paid to a much more vital reality: the "motivations, aspirations, and achievements" of the "rank and file" (p. 164). Since then, the new social history has become old, and its limitations are as clear to us as the limitations of intellectual history were to Rutman. Even on the open field of the new cultural history, however, some writers can not resist casting a few more stones at a prostrate Goliath like Miller. They routinely scold scholars who choose to study preaching and publications for "privileging" the elite and dismissing the common folk. . . .

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