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A New England Town: The First Hundred Years
The colonial New England Town is one of the myths of American history, along with such others as George Washington and the Cherry Tree and The Frontier. They are difficult to shatter, for they perpetuate the popular belief that the nation has always enjoyed universal democracy, honesty, and opportunity. The New England Town, however, deserves more than a mythical place in American history. In this industrial village society, the unique American experience had its beginnings.
In his highly original and controversial study. Professor Lockridge traces the origins of Dedham, Massachusetts, carefully examining its establishment as a utopia in 1636, the changes that occurred during the first four generations of its settlement, and the kind of community it had become by the mid-eighteenth century. In bringing to life this peculiarly American town he creates a view of all New England towns, so vital to an understanding of how the American character and society were shaped. He also gives answers to the basic questions shrouded by the myths: Was the New England Town democratic? Was it equalitarian? Was opportunity great? was society mobile? was it static or dynamic? Who had power, and who wanted it? In examining these questions Professor Lockridge has gone to the heart of the controversy surrounding the New England Town experience, finding some truth, and not a little irony, in the myth.
This enlarged edition includes an updated bibliography and an afterword in which Lockridge addresses two questions about the story of Dedham: What does it tell us about the impulses that led to American independence? The answers to these questions suggest the connections between the "new" social history and the broad political themes of the revolutionary period.
In his highly original and controversial study. Professor Lockridge traces the origins of Dedham, Massachusetts, carefully examining its establishment as a utopia in 1636, the changes that occurred during the first four generations of its settlement, and the kind of community it had become by the mid-eighteenth century. In bringing to life this peculiarly American town he creates a view of all New England towns, so vital to an understanding of how the American character and society were shaped. He also gives answers to the basic questions shrouded by the myths: Was the New England Town democratic? Was it equalitarian? Was opportunity great? was society mobile? was it static or dynamic? Who had power, and who wanted it? In examining these questions Professor Lockridge has gone to the heart of the controversy surrounding the New England Town experience, finding some truth, and not a little irony, in the myth.
This enlarged edition includes an updated bibliography and an afterword in which Lockridge addresses two questions about the story of Dedham: What does it tell us about the impulses that led to American independence? The answers to these questions suggest the connections between the "new" social history and the broad political themes of the revolutionary period.
238 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1970
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 2, 2025
Great read.
July 8, 2023
This is an interesting history of Dedham, Massachusetts, from its founding as a land grant to Puritans in 1636 and through 100-plus years as it evolved from its religiously inspired utopian roots. This history is combined with an analysis of how the town's founders' goals reflected not only their vision but the opportunities and inspirations of all of the people from England who were coming to America in the 17th century. In doing so, the author tries to explain how some of our longstanding beliefs about what makes America special are either inaccurate or are only half-right. It's an interesting and detailed way of looking at those founding themes, and I think he makes a good case.
Keep in mind that the book is more than 50 years old, and I'm sure that scholarship has been expanded in the ensuing years. Studying colonial New England was clearly a growth industry in the 1960s, as the author references dozens of new works at the time, much of which had information painstakingly gathered by reading detailed records of counties and churches, as well as diaries. Wonderful work by many people to find the source material and not just look for anecdotes about births or lawsuits, but actually counting everything they could, like how many sons a family had and if they stayed in the same town when they reached maturity or if they emigrated elsewhere for more opportunity. This type of work really opens the door to understanding which forces of inertia drove people to stay in place and which forces of opportunity drove others away. Given that we think if America as a land of opportunity and relentless push westward, the findings of this book are important because they show that, in fact, people in Dedham stayed as long as they could --- often three or more generations --- rather than headed west. The safety, security and comfortable enough farming experience kept them where they were. The people who came to America had come because they wanted peace and security and the ability to have some control over their own religious practices. As long as there was enough arable land in or near Dedham, they didn't go any further, and that was more than 50 years.
The thing that stood out for me most in this book is the author's explanation that the original town/village of Dedham, which was in the northern section of 200 square miles of deeded land, was truly an attempt at a utopian society. It was not alone in the colonies at the time, but it's still remarkable to me that this utopian ideal really was the driving force. I think of Jamestown colony, which was a commercial venture, as more typically American. And certainly we have become a commercial nation, not a utopian one. But Dedham and many other places were utopian, built on Puritan beliefs. The members literally wrote and signed a Covenant with each other that pledged peace and loyalty and stated that they feared God. They wrote that they knew they could not reach perfection on this earth, but they would do their best to emulate what they assumed was perfection in heaven. Stunningly, this actually worked for about 50 years, as the author's research showed that disputes were rare and were settled by a small panel of appointed covenant signers. Wow.
The other key point the author makes is that to have this type of utopian society, the members had to restrict participation. If they let in everyone, then they would not have people who were really committed to the covenant. I hadn't thought of the original settles as exclusionary, but clearly they were. They made it very hard to be allowed to sign the covenant, even though the point of the covenant was equality under God. This contradiction has stayed with America ever since -- the idea that people come here to have power over their lives, but only some people are allowed inside the gate. And on top of that, once you are allowed inside then you actually give up a lot of power because you agree to abide by the rules of the gatekeepers. Freedom vs. community was a challenge that Dedham avoided for about 50 years by staying on the community side because it brought peace, but then the innate need of people for freedom started to chip away. And that, too, is the story of colonial America and is part (but only part) of what led to the Revolutionary War.
I could easily give this book a fourth star because it does make the interesting points above, as well as others. But it's redundant and a little hard to understand at times. It's not really a book for a beginner; one would do better if one already had knowledge of those early colonial days. Also, for anyone reading it today, the lack of discussion of things that capture historians' attention now, like women and Blacks, is sort of conspicuous. The author might argue that he was trying to write about how early villages were governed, how they interacted with counties and colonies and ultimately with the British government in London, and that since women and Blacks had no formal say in matters, it wasn't his domain. All that is true. But someone writing this book now would analyze what those absences meant in the context of building an American culture and political framework, but this book was written at a time when that wasn't done.
Regardless, this is interesting stuff, and it made me think about how communities worked then and work today. I am kind of envious of the spirit with which people operated in those early colonial days, though I realize that life was severely proscribed and that it would be almost impossible for someone with modern sensibilities to survive a month without being thrown in the stocks for various insults and forms of blasphemy. But it worked for the settlers for a long time, and they bequeathed to the rest of us some ideals that (although not actually lived up to much of the time) are valuable: community, self-governance, mediation, and more.
Keep in mind that the book is more than 50 years old, and I'm sure that scholarship has been expanded in the ensuing years. Studying colonial New England was clearly a growth industry in the 1960s, as the author references dozens of new works at the time, much of which had information painstakingly gathered by reading detailed records of counties and churches, as well as diaries. Wonderful work by many people to find the source material and not just look for anecdotes about births or lawsuits, but actually counting everything they could, like how many sons a family had and if they stayed in the same town when they reached maturity or if they emigrated elsewhere for more opportunity. This type of work really opens the door to understanding which forces of inertia drove people to stay in place and which forces of opportunity drove others away. Given that we think if America as a land of opportunity and relentless push westward, the findings of this book are important because they show that, in fact, people in Dedham stayed as long as they could --- often three or more generations --- rather than headed west. The safety, security and comfortable enough farming experience kept them where they were. The people who came to America had come because they wanted peace and security and the ability to have some control over their own religious practices. As long as there was enough arable land in or near Dedham, they didn't go any further, and that was more than 50 years.
The thing that stood out for me most in this book is the author's explanation that the original town/village of Dedham, which was in the northern section of 200 square miles of deeded land, was truly an attempt at a utopian society. It was not alone in the colonies at the time, but it's still remarkable to me that this utopian ideal really was the driving force. I think of Jamestown colony, which was a commercial venture, as more typically American. And certainly we have become a commercial nation, not a utopian one. But Dedham and many other places were utopian, built on Puritan beliefs. The members literally wrote and signed a Covenant with each other that pledged peace and loyalty and stated that they feared God. They wrote that they knew they could not reach perfection on this earth, but they would do their best to emulate what they assumed was perfection in heaven. Stunningly, this actually worked for about 50 years, as the author's research showed that disputes were rare and were settled by a small panel of appointed covenant signers. Wow.
The other key point the author makes is that to have this type of utopian society, the members had to restrict participation. If they let in everyone, then they would not have people who were really committed to the covenant. I hadn't thought of the original settles as exclusionary, but clearly they were. They made it very hard to be allowed to sign the covenant, even though the point of the covenant was equality under God. This contradiction has stayed with America ever since -- the idea that people come here to have power over their lives, but only some people are allowed inside the gate. And on top of that, once you are allowed inside then you actually give up a lot of power because you agree to abide by the rules of the gatekeepers. Freedom vs. community was a challenge that Dedham avoided for about 50 years by staying on the community side because it brought peace, but then the innate need of people for freedom started to chip away. And that, too, is the story of colonial America and is part (but only part) of what led to the Revolutionary War.
I could easily give this book a fourth star because it does make the interesting points above, as well as others. But it's redundant and a little hard to understand at times. It's not really a book for a beginner; one would do better if one already had knowledge of those early colonial days. Also, for anyone reading it today, the lack of discussion of things that capture historians' attention now, like women and Blacks, is sort of conspicuous. The author might argue that he was trying to write about how early villages were governed, how they interacted with counties and colonies and ultimately with the British government in London, and that since women and Blacks had no formal say in matters, it wasn't his domain. All that is true. But someone writing this book now would analyze what those absences meant in the context of building an American culture and political framework, but this book was written at a time when that wasn't done.
Regardless, this is interesting stuff, and it made me think about how communities worked then and work today. I am kind of envious of the spirit with which people operated in those early colonial days, though I realize that life was severely proscribed and that it would be almost impossible for someone with modern sensibilities to survive a month without being thrown in the stocks for various insults and forms of blasphemy. But it worked for the settlers for a long time, and they bequeathed to the rest of us some ideals that (although not actually lived up to much of the time) are valuable: community, self-governance, mediation, and more.
November 2, 2020
An interesting book - will help me with some research I'm doing.
October 31, 2021
At one time part of the standard historiography --
Read
October 20, 2023Don't know why I read this but America was founded on cults it's deep in our roots
October 7, 2024
Disappointing. Heavy on the sociology but hardly a history of the town. Maybe one sentence on King Philip's War.
November 22, 2019
1970 proved a seminal year in colonial American scholarship: it saw the publication of four monographs on Puritan communities, inaugurating the influential “New England Town Study” genre of American social history. Kenneth Lockridge’s study of Dedham may have been the best of the four. Clearly written, well organized, and deeply researched, it advanced an original argument: the Puritan town was not a distinctly American institution, but rather a European peasant village imported to the continent by people who “turned their backs on the wilderness” (168). The consensus historians of the 1940s and ‘50s portrayed America as an exceptional and liberal culture from the days of Jamestown and Plymouth. Lockridge instead presented it as a cultural margin of Europe, part of the Old World rather than the New.
Dedham’s founders built their town around a Covenant stressing peace and harmony, a church with a restricted but not stagnant membership, and the family ownership of land. Abundant land slowed the emergence of class divisions, and deference to a small elite of selectmen prevented political chaos. The Puritans of Dedham, however, were not Buddhist monks. Peace and order mattered to them, but so did hard work, marriage, and children. By 1700 some Dedhamites had become rich by investing their surpluses in mills and stores and trade. Some became poor as the soil wore out and imperial warfare prevented them from migrating out. Nearly all had too many children. The town’s population grew from 150 or so to 750 between 1636 and 1700 (4, 65), and a healthy environment and low infant mortality ensured continued growth. Dedham and New England faced in the 1700s an increasingly Malthusian world.
Change and growth made Dedham a more contentious place. Town meetings, previously devoted to consensus, became more quarrelsome. Outlying settlers demanded separation from the community, and broke off to form their own smaller towns, where “the old political harmonies could be restored” (133). (One of these daughter communities, Norwood, became your reviewer’s birthplace in the year of NEW ENGLAND TOWN ‘s publication.) Other pressures diminished after poor young men went into the army, and after the Revolutionary War opened the Ohio Valley to white settlement. What remained, in Dedham and other New England towns, was a deep-rooted social anxiety, a realization of how easily events could disrupt not only order but social equality.
Herein lies the significance of Lockridge’s book. The Puritans, quintessential early Americans, turn out to be not small-town democrats nor hard-working businessmen nor witch-hunting scolds, but anxious peasants obsessed with social harmony and equality. Dedham wasn’t a little Athens, but a “Christian Utopian Closed Corporate Community” (16). One can see why this interpretation resonated with readers in the 1970s. Lockridge didn’t call the Puritans hippies, but they lived in communes and pursued peace and brotherly love nonetheless.
Scholars would adduce two problems with Lockridge’s characterization of the early Dedhamites as “peasants.” First, as T.H. Breen and Bernard Bailyn pointed out, all of New England’s towns depended from an early date on Atlantic trade. Incorporation into an international market undermined Dedham’s independence from the start, not just after 1700. Secondly, unlike contemporary European peasants, Dedham’s settlers had a very high level of literacy, which allowed them to develop ideas and religious identities at odds with the communitarianism of field, church, and town. The Puritans lived in a much larger mental world, defined by the Bible and religious literature rather than just their geographic locality. Lockridge’s townspeople were as much commercial English folk and educated Protestants as they were Dedhamites. This is not to take away, though, from the author’s achievement: persuading us to stop thinking of Puritans as mere proto-Americans, and to endeavor to understand them on their own historically-grounded terms.
Dedham’s founders built their town around a Covenant stressing peace and harmony, a church with a restricted but not stagnant membership, and the family ownership of land. Abundant land slowed the emergence of class divisions, and deference to a small elite of selectmen prevented political chaos. The Puritans of Dedham, however, were not Buddhist monks. Peace and order mattered to them, but so did hard work, marriage, and children. By 1700 some Dedhamites had become rich by investing their surpluses in mills and stores and trade. Some became poor as the soil wore out and imperial warfare prevented them from migrating out. Nearly all had too many children. The town’s population grew from 150 or so to 750 between 1636 and 1700 (4, 65), and a healthy environment and low infant mortality ensured continued growth. Dedham and New England faced in the 1700s an increasingly Malthusian world.
Change and growth made Dedham a more contentious place. Town meetings, previously devoted to consensus, became more quarrelsome. Outlying settlers demanded separation from the community, and broke off to form their own smaller towns, where “the old political harmonies could be restored” (133). (One of these daughter communities, Norwood, became your reviewer’s birthplace in the year of NEW ENGLAND TOWN ‘s publication.) Other pressures diminished after poor young men went into the army, and after the Revolutionary War opened the Ohio Valley to white settlement. What remained, in Dedham and other New England towns, was a deep-rooted social anxiety, a realization of how easily events could disrupt not only order but social equality.
Herein lies the significance of Lockridge’s book. The Puritans, quintessential early Americans, turn out to be not small-town democrats nor hard-working businessmen nor witch-hunting scolds, but anxious peasants obsessed with social harmony and equality. Dedham wasn’t a little Athens, but a “Christian Utopian Closed Corporate Community” (16). One can see why this interpretation resonated with readers in the 1970s. Lockridge didn’t call the Puritans hippies, but they lived in communes and pursued peace and brotherly love nonetheless.
Scholars would adduce two problems with Lockridge’s characterization of the early Dedhamites as “peasants.” First, as T.H. Breen and Bernard Bailyn pointed out, all of New England’s towns depended from an early date on Atlantic trade. Incorporation into an international market undermined Dedham’s independence from the start, not just after 1700. Secondly, unlike contemporary European peasants, Dedham’s settlers had a very high level of literacy, which allowed them to develop ideas and religious identities at odds with the communitarianism of field, church, and town. The Puritans lived in a much larger mental world, defined by the Bible and religious literature rather than just their geographic locality. Lockridge’s townspeople were as much commercial English folk and educated Protestants as they were Dedhamites. This is not to take away, though, from the author’s achievement: persuading us to stop thinking of Puritans as mere proto-Americans, and to endeavor to understand them on their own historically-grounded terms.
August 15, 2015
3.5 This looks at the Massachusetts town of Dedham from the 1630s to the 1730s to see how it shifted from a utopian Puritan community to more conventional structure. Lockridge concludes that along with later generations not sharing the utopian vision, Dedham also suffered from expansion, as outlying areas wanted their own local government and church. Lockridge says that contrary to the idea this sort of town represented a radical break with European tradition, the initial lifestyle was fairly close to European peasantry, with more emphasis on communitarian ideals than what we now think of as "American" individual rights.
November 22, 2009
I would only recommend this book to scholars who are studying American colonies. The book follows the story of Dedham, Massachusetts from its founding through its growth and decline. More or less a study of politics which were constructed to govern a town built on Utopianism.
April 14, 2009
Fantastic look at one New England town. No one can understand New England without reading this.
November 16, 2014
Drags on quite a bit, especially on attempts at dividing the the town into new municipalities. At it's heart are really important insights into the American spirit pre-revolution.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews