History 248 Reading Guide

The New England Town in the 17th and 18th Centuries:  The Intensification of Familiar Ideals and the Seeds of Change

  • Stephen Baskerville, “The Family in Puritan Political Theology,” Journal of Family History 18.2 (1993), 157-177.  (e-reserve)
  • Patricia J. Tracy, “Re-Considering Migration Within Colonial New England,” Journal of Social History 23.1 (1989), 93-113.  Academic Search Premier

Further reading:

Questions:

Baskerville’s article offers a “thick” study of English Puritan popular and political theology in the years leading up to the seventeenth-century Puritan Revolution in England.

  • What sources does Baskerville use to develop his discussion?  What can these tell us about the English Puritan roots of the early New England colonists?
  • What should we make of the careful delineation of roles that the Puritan ministers defined? What are the implications of those roles for individuals, both within their families and their communities?  Do we know how the members responded to these prescriptions?
  • What does Baskerville’s study suggest about the society from which the early New England Puritans came, and the ways that their previous experience shaped their world view as they began to establish a new society in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay?
  • Why did the Puritans offer such a strong indictment of the Catholic church?

In contrast to the more usual practice of examining a single colonial New England town over time, Tracy’s article on “leavers” offers a case study of the economic and familial motivations for migration from established towns (such as Northampton, Massachusetts) to newly settled regions.

  • When families left an established town, were they pushed out by economic circumstances in the town or pulled in by the opportunities that awaited them in the new settlement?  What is the difference?
  • What does the kind of geographic mobility that Tracy describes tell us about the nature of family and community in colonial New England?