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Review
| Daily Life in Colonial New England, by Claudia Durst Johnson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. 248 pages. $49.95, cloth.Colonial America: A History in Documents, edited by Edward G. Gray. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 192 pages. $32.95, cloth.
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| Johnson's and Gray's books are, respectively, entries in Greenwood's "Daily Life Through History" series and Oxford's "Pages from History" series. Daily Life in Colonial New England's format, advertising, and price suggest that it is intended for reference collections in middle and high school libraries. It offers a topically organized account of New England before the Revolution, with chapters on Puritan doctrine, domestic arrangements, social institutions, and labor. Chapters on Indians, slavery, servitude, and the persecution of religious dissidents introduce students to non-Puritan actors. At its core, however, the book remains a traditional study of the origins, efflorescence, and decline of Puritan culture in New England. A work of synthesis, Daily Life in Colonial New England draws heavily on secondary sources, mostly familiar titles like Edmund Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma (1958) and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Good Wives (1991). Johnson makes little use of the periodical and dissertation literature and seldom cites primary sources. What most engages her mind is religious belief and practice. When she strays from doctrine her narrative often becomes cursory, evidenced by the surprising number of single-sentence paragraphs. We read, for example, "The darkest sides of slavery in New England, as in the South, included the sexual abuse of slave women by their masters" (p. 153). That's it: end of subject. It's one of many lonely topic sentences begging for fresh detail. |
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Colonial America: A History in Documents offers the editorial equivalent of the single-sentence paragraph: primary sources reduced to brief excerpts. Gray's treatment of A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) is a fair example. The power of that venerable work derives from its cumulative effect, the small details of suffering and insight that emerge in the course of the narrative. But Gray extracts just three short pieces, totaling about a thousand words, and embeds them in a commentary nearly as long as the fragmented document. "Mary's account is filled with tales of her own suffering," he writes, "but it also provides glimpses of some of the more ordinary aspects of a captive's life. In the following passage, Mary describes her first night in captivity, and her discovery that captivity meant, among other things, sleeping outside, with little protection from the elements" (unpaginated quotation from advanced reading copy). Is it necessary to say all this? Allowing that the series is intended for middle- and high-school students, this sort of descriptive commentary still seems redundant and obtrusive. The book's layout fosters the impression of wasted space. The margins are huge, three inches per page. Definitions, captions, and snatches of verse pop up in some margins, while others remain blank. The design is MTV-ish. Several fonts appear on the same page, above, beside, and below illustrations that suddenly jut into and across the text. Surveyor's notes of no apparent significance take up one entire page, a modern rendering of an Indian oration another. Lavishly illustrated, Colonial America is the SUV of documentary collections: lots of flash and low gas mileage. |
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Even if it were of thriftier design, I doubt whether Colonial America would be a wise addition to a secondary or college-level reading list. The internet is making documentary collections obsolete. For two decades I assigned volume one of the Norton Anthology of American Literature in my American History Survey I and Early American History courses. It was convenient and cost-efficient. My students could find John Smith, John Winthrop, Elizabeth Ashbridge, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and dozens of other writers and historical actors between the covers of one book. The trouble was that the covers grew farther and farther apart over the years. Somewhere around the fourth edition the Norton Anthology became so bloated that even the most determined and multiculturally minded graduate student couldn't get through more than a fraction of its 2,570 densely printed pages. It was like buying a phone book to find a handful of numbers. So I sat down at my computer, called up Google, and discovered that every one of the primary sources I wanted to use was available on the Internet. Several came in multiple versions; it was just a question of which font and illustrations I preferred. (Put "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in a search engine and you'll see what I mean.) I inserted the links in an on-line syllabus and haven't looked back. Why anyone would require students to purchase an expensive book rather than perform this simple chore is beyond me. |
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| University of North Florida |
David T. Courtwright |
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