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Reviews of Books
Divided We Stand: Watertown, Massachusetts, 1630–1680. By
ROGER THOMPSON (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Pp. xviii, 269. $39.95.)
Reviewed by Virginia DeJohn Anderson, University of Colorado, Boulder
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Roger Thompson introduces Divided We Stand as an example of microhistory rather than as a contribution to the venerable tradition of New England community studies. Nevertheless, the book's focus on social, religious, and political developments in one New England town and the absence of the central unifying figure or event that typically identifies a microhistory make it a town study. Published thirty years after the first ground-breaking works appeared, Divided We Stand offers readers the opportunity to reflect not only on the trials and tribulations of early Watertown but also on the fate of the scholarly genre to which the book belongs. |
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The pioneering works of Kenneth A. Lockridge and Philip J. Greven, Jr., energized a field that seemed to have gone dormant under the chilly dominance of Puritan studies.1 These authors, and many who followed their lead, drew inspiration from the French Annales school and English advances in local history as they examined the structures of community and the experiences of ordinary people. The hallmark of the "new social history" was as much methodological as thematic. Case studies of individual towns set geographic bounds within which exhaustive research could be conducted, and sophisticated quantitative analysis promised the kind of objective results that historians rarely encountered. From such tightly focused investigations, it was thought, large questions about early New England could be addressed. |
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The results of the new approach were mixed. Town studies revealed a great deal about the workings of politics and religion, family and property, communalism and individualism in several New England communities. But they failed to resolve certain important issues, in part because of the methodology itself. Social historians' reliance on quantitative techniques encouraged them to pose questions with numerical solutions. The localist framework by definition downplayed each town's connection with the larger world. However much town records revealed about white male property holders, they gave short shrift to women, the propertyless, transients, and Indians. |
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Then there was the problem of representativeness. Did other towns share Dedham's early commitment to communalism? Were Andover's land divisions and inheritance practices typical? This issue could only be resolved with more town studies. But authors whose work simply confirmed earlier results had difficulty finding publishers, while studies that advanced different conclusions or asked different questions frustrated readers hoping to draw broad conclusions about early New England. Finally, the novelty of the "new" social history invited scrutiny. As it turned out, each town study, in its own way, presented an all-too-familiar story of declension. Town unity disintegrated into divisiveness, churches splintered, religious fervor diminished, rebellious children defied patriarchal authority, once-generous landholdings shrank below the point of viability. Community studies resembled Puritan studies, only with statistics. |
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