Reviewed by Steven Stoll | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 567 words from this article are provided below; about 591 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Steven Stoll | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Steven Stoll, Yale University

The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. By Brian Donahue. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. 344 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
The Great Meadow is not an ethnographic study, not a social history, not a work with an eye toward larger currents within American history, not a history of ideas or politics. It is a history of environmental practice and colonial land use in the context of the town of Concord, Massachusetts. At the book's center are the many meadows that made up the Great Meadow itself. "The meadows lay at the bottom of husbandry in Concord. Without the meadows, agriculture would have required another footing and taken another form" (166). But the Great Meadow served an ecological purpose prior to its use in the agricultural economy. It was the flood plain for the Concord River, and before English farmers could coax it into providing food for cattle it needed to be drained and planted with palatable grasses in a process that took three generations to complete. The constant labor and exquisite economy that held the Great Meadow from the river and kept it central to the lives of the families who owned it tells a story of constancy and transformation.	1
Farmers tend to leave behind durable signs of their existence. Patterns of land holdings persist in the landscape and in deeds and probate estates. Yet the story of land use over decades and centuries is a hard one to tell in part because these documents obscure as much as they reveal. Reading the landscape itself can be a thrilling experience, but one that usually privileges its most recent inhabitants and points scholars toward core samples and other tools of historical archaeology. Legal instruments furnish only a snapshot of any particular piece of land; they rarely give a complete picture of all the land under the ownership of one family; and they provide only sketchy details about how people used land—as meadow or woodlot, for example. What makes The Great Meadow different from any other study of a colonial New England community is that Brian Donahue treats the legal documents as tiny data points to which he adds evidence about soil types, vegetation, and topography in models he created with Geographic Information Systems.¹ The result is a series of "deep maps"—multidimensional representations of the town of Concord—that documents the land holdings of fifty families, for more than three and a half centuries, covering several thousand acres, amounting to almost a thousand different pieces of land.	2
The maps are the central invention and major innovation of the book, but the book is more than its maps. The Great Meadow is a narrative that operates on three levels. It is the history of the town of Concord from the receding of a glacier that made the stony New England soils to the various divisions of the common lands, which Donahue discusses with delicate attention to the interests and changes in each family he considers. It is a history of the Brooks, Hartwell, and Meriam families (along with many other owners), with attention to their English mixed husbandry and the life-cycle events that changed the number, shape, and use of their holdings. And it is a history of the Great Meadow itself, as the central landscape of the town.	. . .

There are about 591 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.