Firth Haring Fabend has studied a large colonial American family over five generations. The Haring family settled in the Hackensack Valley (on the New York/New Jersey border), where they lived, prospered, and remained throughout the eighteenth century. Fabend looks at how this ordinary family of independent, middle-class farmers coped with immigration, established themselves in a community, acquired land and capital, and took part in the social, political, economic, and religious changes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As she traces the lives of the Harings and their...

The Dutch came to the New World in the seventeenth century as explorers and traders, but religion soon followed, for it was accepted in the Netherlands that state and church were mutually benefited by advancing the "true Christian religion." The influence of "Dutchness"--defined here as loyalty to what are presumed to be the distinctive qualities of Dutch national character and culture--persisted in New York and New Jersey for more than 200 years after Dutch emigration ended. Why?

Firth Haring Fabend finds the explanation in the devotion of the Reformed Dutch Church membership to the...