| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

John Demos. Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America. (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization.) Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 98. $19.95.
The contrast between cyclical and linear conceptions of time and experience has long fascinated philosophers, scientists, and historians. In this slim volume, based on the 2002 William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in American Civilization at Harvard University, John Demos casts the American Revolution as the crucial turning point in the triumph of "time's arrow" over "time's cycle."	1
Demos deftly depicts a seventeenth century in which the cyclical framed both consciousness and experience. So tightly bound were colonial Americans to nature's cycles, in which repetition and stasis were expected, that members of the first generations could not even reckon with their own break from tradition when they migrated across the Atlantic. "Circles" refers to the sun's daily movement, the monthly lunar cycle, and the annual change of seasons: cycles that largely determined the contours of daily experience as well as of the life cycle, as Demos demonstrates with fascinating figures depicting annual cycles related to weddings, conception, births, illness, and death (pp. 12–14). To be sure, colonial life was anything but predictable, what with eclipses, Indian raids, and epidemics. Demos suggests, however, that these events were read as disruptions of cycles rather than turning points, starting points, or, indeed, endings.	. . .

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