Peoples of a Spacious Land: Families and Cultures in Colonial New England. By Gloria L. Main. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 237. $49.95.

Extract

Family relationships were not immune to the complexities of settler life that are a consistent theme in much of the literature on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. Gloria L. Main's work uses patterns of family growth and their influence on land acquisition to explain the English settlement of New England. Her methodology brings together research from several distinct disciplines and uses an in-depth analysis of the history, placing Main's work in the same category as that of noted authors John Demos (A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Kenneth Lockridge (A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736. New York: Norton, 1985). Main incorporates a complex and broad range of disciplines including economics, history, psychology, anthropology, and sociology and applies them to the historical issue of settlement. To support her thesis Main uses diaries of settlers and later generations for a primary-source account of events as well as analysis. Overall, Main presents her ideas in a clear, concise manner and avoids the nit picking that can occur between and within disciplines.