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...
The year 2000 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of A Little Commonwealth by Bancroft Prize-winning scholar John Demos. This groundbre...
In this intimate, engaging book, John Demos offers an illuminating portrait of how colonial Americans, from the first settlers to the post-revolutionary generation, viewed their life experiences. He also offers an invaluable inside look into the craft of a master social historian as he unearths - in sometimes unexpected places - fragments of evidence that help us probe the interior lives of people from the faraway past. The earliest settlers lived in a traditional world of natural cycles that shaped their behaviour: day and night; seasonal rhythms; the lunar cycle; the life cycle itself....
In this intimate, engaging book, John Demos offers an illuminating portrait of how colonial Americans, from the first settlers to the post-revolutiona...
The book that launched environmental history now updated.
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize
In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one...
The book that launched environmental history now updated.
"These documents have been chosen, in every case, for the way they reflect lived experience among average people in our colonial past. There is no real substitute for such primary evidence -- no other way to capture the feel of events from day to day, year to year, generation to generation." -- from the Preface
"These documents have been chosen, in every case, for the way they reflect lived experience among average people in our colonial past. There is no rea...
'The Enemy Within' chronicles the most prominent witch-hunts of the Western world and shows how the fear of witchcraft has fuelled recurrent cycles of accusation, persecution and purging.
'The Enemy Within' chronicles the most prominent witch-hunts of the Western world and shows how the fear of witchcraft has fuelled recurrent cycles of...
Award-winning historian John Demos tells the astonishing and moving story of a unique missionary project, which probes the very roots of American identity. Near the start of the nineteenth century, as the United States looked outward to the wider world, a group of eminent Protestant ministers devised a grand scheme for gathering the rest of mankind into the redemptive fold of Christianity and "civiization." Its core element was a special school for "heathen youth" drawn from all parts of the earth, and, especially, the native nations of North America. If all went well, graduates would...
Award-winning historian John Demos tells the astonishing and moving story of a unique missionary project, which probes the very roots of American i...
