| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Fissures in the Rock: New England in the Seventeenth Century. By Richard Archer. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001. xii, 230 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 1-58465-084-2. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-58465-085-0.)

Richard Archer has done the profession a great service with his new book, Fissures in the Rock. By synthesizing the past four decades of the historiography, including his own demographic research, he has given us an engaging overview of New England's early decades. 1

Arguing that New England history is much more diverse and complex than schoolbook stereotypes of Puritan settlements and Pilgrims, Archer labors to bring together a historiography that has become notably rich, complex, and segregated. By and large, historians working on Native Americans, Puritanism, town studies, and women's history talk only to their own kind rather than attempting to see New England as a whole. Archer's story still focuses primarily on the English men who were the political, economic, and spiritual leaders of settler communities, as his goal is to put the stereotype of "'Puritan New England' to rest" rather than to attempt a truly integrationist narrative. He argues convincingly that Englishness rather than Puritanism was the primary unifying characteristic of the region's English communities. . . .

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