San Antonio College Library

Benes, the director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, has produced a handsome and magisterial volume that will be the definitive study of the meetinghouses of Puritan New England for this generation. Building on earlier work by himself and others, Benes offers not radical reinterpretation but carefully nuanced analysis and synthesis of a mass of information (much of which is tabulated in appendixes). Although focusing on architectural...

"Its rise, progress, and termination, as exhibited by Dr. Cotton Mather in 'The wonders of the invisible world,' and by Mr. Robert Calef in his 'More wonders of the invisible world'"--T.p.

"Here are fifty-five primary documents, culled from journals and diaries, courtroom testimony and sermons, which vividly bring to life the issues and attitudes of Puritan-Indian contact in seventeenth-century New England. The native-settler relationship is seen as a cultural conflict with a philosophical basis, arising out of the unity and conviction of hostile, but similar, cultures. Through conflicting voices we become privy to the Puritans' character,...

Publisher's description: Using objects that Americans have saved through the centuries and stories they have passed along, as well as histories teased from documents, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich chronicles the production of cloth -- and of history -- in early America. Under the singular and brilliant lens that Ulrich brings to this study, ordinary household goods -- Indian baskets, spinning wheels, a chimneypiece, a cupboard, a niddy-noddy, bed coverings,...

An ecological history of colonial New England, looking at how the shift from Indian to European dominance affected the plant and animal communities of the region.

In contrast to most accounts of Puritan-Indian relations, this book argues that the first two generations of Puritan settlers were neither generally hostile toward their Indian neighbors nor indifferent to their territorial rights. Rather, American Puritans, especially their political and religious leaders, sought peaceful and equitable relations as the first step in molding the Indians into neo-Englishmen.