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A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (Galaxy Books)
by John Putnam Demos
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (1971-02-15)
ISBN: 0195013557
EAN: 9780195013559
Dewy Decimal #: 301.4210974482
Paperback: 222 pages
SKU: 01948
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Book in good condition.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
The year 2000 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of A Little Commonwealth by Bancroft Prize-winning scholar John Demos. This groundbreaking study examines the family in the context of the colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. Basing his work on physical artifacts, wills, estate inventories, and a variety of legal and official enactments, Demos portrays the family as a structure of roles and relationships, emphasizing those of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant. The book's most startling insights come from a reconsideration of commonly-held views of American Puritans and of the ways in which they dealt with one another. Demos concludes that Puritan "repression" was not as strongly directed against sexuality as against the expression of hostile and aggressive impulses, and he shows how this pattern reflected prevalent modes of family life and child-rearing. The result is an in-depth study of the ordinary life of a colonial community, located in the broader environment of seventeenth-century America.
Demos has provided a new foreword and a list of further reading for this second edition, which will offer a new generation of readers access to this classic study.
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Amazon.com Review
The customary modern image of the New England Puritans is a dark one: the Puritans, religious dissenters who valued propriety and order, are seen as a witch-hunting, suspicious tribe, and their very name carries connotations of grimness and primness. Thirty years ago, at the outset of his career as a historian, John Demos decided to reexamine that view in light of the evidence. Among the findings that he reports in A Little Commonwealth is the surprising discovery that the Puritans were not so, well, puritanical. They were not, Demos argues, especially consumed by ideology, and in their daily lives, "religion seems to figure in a somewhat haphazard and occasional way." The Puritans, he continues, had no unusual objections to sexuality or fun-seeking, except where such activities endangered social harmony--and the Puritans were indeed fiercely protective of group stability. Demos examines such documents as the transcripts of divorce proceedings to suggest that Puritan women enjoyed, if not equal rights, then better consideration than most women in other English colonies in the New World. He looks closely into the material culture of the Puritans, which shows some odd discrepancies: for instance, although few households possessed more than a single chair (usually reserved for the elderly), many contained elaborate wardrobes--for, Demos writes, "clothing was not only a good investment for a man of some means; it was also a way of demonstrating his standing in the larger community and of confirming his own self-image." In questioning the view of the Puritans as a plain-dressing, plain-living, haunted, and repressed sect, Demos provides a close and intriguing look at the New England past. Reissued on the 30th anniversary of its first publication, A Little Commonwealth deserves a wide audience today. --Gregory McNamee
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Customer Reviews
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I highly recomend it.
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-01-05
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Although written in 1970 it provides an interesting look at every aspect of colonial life in New England. I highly recomend it for everyone interested in this period of history. Academic but not boring.
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Dry Textbook, Requires Effort
Rating  (3)
Date: 2006-12-21
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Mr. Demos certainly did a tremendous amount of research in preparing this work, as his information is plentiful, organized, and lends support to his theories.
However, one should be warned that the writing style is quite dry, his refences to numbers and factoids are unending, and the entertainment quotient of the book is near zero. As a reference volume, there are plenty of interesting tables and charts to glean. As a flowing, historical piece that tells a story which brings the Old Colony's residents to life, it is lacking.
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A Classic Study that Redefined the Pilgrims
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-12-29
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
I first read this book while in graduate school during the late 1970s, and I am glad it has been reissued in this new edition. John Demos was one of a group of "new social historians" in the latter 1960s that made colonial New England his domain and reinterpreted what we know about the Puritans "from the bottom up." Including Kenneth A. Lockridge ("A New England Town," 1970), Philip J. Greven ("Four Generations," 1970), and a few others, these historians employed the analysis of legal documents, especially wills and probate records, to uncover the past of the more "ordinary" New Englanders. Concentrating on small units in their study--Demos on Plymouth, Lockridge on Dedham, and Greven on Andover--they also employed, for the first time, material culture analysis of buildings, the accoutrements of everyday life, and findings from historical archeology and anthropology to understand better the nature of colonial New England.
Previously, historians had relied heavily upon letters, diaries, sermons, autobiographies, and other writings to construct their portrait of the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Almost by definition, this documentary record skewed the account toward telling the story of New England's social and political elites. The use of these new materials transformed our understanding of this time and place in American history. It may be hard to appreciate how exciting this approach to American history seemed at the time. These historians, using both the tools of social science and measured statistical analysis, rescued from obscurity the everyday lives of the rank and file who settled New England. William Bradford, Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, and other elites remained significant, but the story was now so much broader and interesting. It was such a breath of fresh air! Many of us in graduate school at the time embraced their lead and sought to apply at least some of their methodologies to our own work.
"A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony" is one of the best of these "new social histories." John Demos unearthed, in some cases literally through archaeological excavations, the style of life present at Plymouth Plantation. In the process he transformed our understanding of these religious separatists. He makes some startling revelations, destroying many old myths about marriage, family, and lifestyle. The basic organizing unit, according to Demos, was the nuclear family. He inferred this from probate records, but he also noted that the small size of the houses forced the exclusion of extended families under one roof. He was criticized for this conclusion, but subsequent research seems to support much of what he wrote. He also found that children married later than had been previously believed, between 23 and 28 years, starting their lives apart from their parents after greater maturity. He also found that the typical family numbered between seven and ten children, had an infant mortality rate of one in ten, that twenty percent of women died in childbirth, and that a man aged 21 could expect to live until 69.2 years but a woman at age 21 had a life expectancy of only 62.2 years.
By far the most path-breaking part of "A Little Commonwealth" deals with Puritan childrearing and the formation of the child's character. During the first year, Demos argues, a baby would receive much nurturing and support. Tranquility was the objective. In the second year, the child was weaned, usually had to deal with a younger sibling, and most interesting underwent an effort to break the spirit and bend it to the will the parents. Taking place in a crowded house, this experience was traumatic to say the least, and Demos asserts that it led to a set of psychological issues that revolved not so much around sex as a "tight cluster of anxieties about aggression" (pp. 134-37). Demos makes the case that fear of aggression, conflict, and loss are the dominant themes of Puritan life in the seventeenth century. At the same time, the Puritan family could be warm and supportive, and joy and fun was also part and parcel of their existence.
Equally important, Demos helps overturn the longstanding stereotype of Puritans. H. L. Mencken once said that the definition of Puritanism was "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Demos pretty much destroys this idea in "A Little Commonwealth" as well. They liked to dress colorfully, have parties, dance, sing, and drink. Despite their traumatic upbringings, he thinks they were not so nearly repressed as previously believed.
This is a very important benchmark in the history of early America and still deserving of serious consideration 35 years after its first publication.
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Life in Old Plymouth
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-08-12
In this study Demos examines family life as it was for the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower, before they joined with the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The book is in three main sections: the physical setting (housing, furnishings, and clothing); the structure of the household (family connections, including servants); and individual development (childhood, coming of age, and old age). The most striking thing is how all aspects of communal life were controlled by the Court: although laws were not draconian, they spelled out how one was to conduct his or her life pretty thoroughly. Mess up and you would be punished. But it's also true that people were not that different back then, either: parents still cared for their children and worried about their futures by making provisions for them; families were at the core of society's welfare; even women were given rights denied them in the mother country. It's interesting that even these first settlers saw the American continent as a vast area just waiting to be colonized, and one of the biggest problems facing the authorities was how to keep settlers from wanting to spread out too far from Plymouth itself, thus weakening communal ties. A highly recommended book.
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PROOF OF THE INERTIA OF HISTORICAL CONTINUITY
Rating  (4)
Date: 2005-07-02
0 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
I found the book to be informative, but not particularly revealing. After reading such books as OLD JULES, by Mari Sandoz (his daughter), and A BEAUTIFUL CRUEL COUNTRY, by Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruz, as well as comparing my life's experiences with those of the Colony (not to mention my own Ms. entitled IT IS EASIER TO FORGIVE THAN TO FORGET, about mother's childhod, her marriage, and the raising of four boys alone during the Great Depression) what impresses me most is the continuity of life styles from one generation to another subject, of course, to the influences of the community in which lives are lived.
I have a degree in History from SFSU that I attended in the 70s, and I agree with what appear to be conclusions of Academics on the subject of mingling disciplines. I believe that the truth of history is best described when there is such a comingling. I came to the conclusion that Historical Continuity is more a matter of emotion than of logic (that cannot be ignored), and that if we can relate emotionally to the vital situation of those about whom we read, we will become better informed. There is little value in repeating what the author reports except as it differs from the values and norms of our own lives. Then, faced with consequential differences, we must adjust our minds to pass judgment based on reality laced with understanding. In the end, we may well discover that given the same circumstances our lives would differ less from those of the past than we think. There are some who proclaim that life is a gift, but I would argue, as might the residents of THE LITTLE COMMONWEALTH, that it is more a duty to perform. How well one performs that duty depends upon our duality; our individuality versus the demands of the community into which we just happened to have been born. I found myself relating my own life experiences, to those of the members of the COMMONWEALTH, and except for the religious severity of the witchhunt imported from Europe, found that I had little difficulty appreciating their situation.
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