A New England Town

A New England Town PDF Author: Kenneth A. Lockridge
Publisher: New York : Norton
ISBN: 9780393053814
Category : Dedham (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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A New England Town

A New England Town PDF Author: Kenneth A. Lockridge
Publisher: New York : Norton
ISBN: 9780393053814
Category : Dedham (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Life in a New England Town, 1787, 1788

Life in a New England Town, 1787, 1788 PDF Author: John Quincy Adams
Publisher: Boston : Little, Brown and Company
ISBN:
Category : Newburyport (Mass.)
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Life in a New England Mill Town

Life in a New England Mill Town PDF Author: Sally Senzell Isaacs
Publisher: Capstone Classroom
ISBN: 9781403405258
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
An overview of life in a nineteenth-century town in which most people worked in the textile mill, including their housing, food, clothing, schools, and everyday activities.

Real Democracy

Real Democracy PDF Author: Frank M. Bryan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226077985
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Relying on an astounding collection of more than three decades of firsthand research, Frank M. Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them. A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy. Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.

A Reforming People

A Reforming People PDF Author: David D. Hall
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307595285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A revelatory account of the aspirations and accomplishments of the people who founded the New England colonies, comparing the reforms they enacted with those attempted in England during the period of the English Revolution. Distinguished historian David D. Hall looks afresh at how the colonists set up churches, civil governments, and methods for distributing land. Bringing with them a deep fear of arbitrary, unlimited authority grounded in either church or state, these settlers based their churches on the participation of laypeople and insisted on “consent” as a premise of all civil governance. Encouraging broad participation and relying on the vigorous use of petitioning, they also transformed civil and criminal law and the workings of courts. The outcome was a civil society far less authoritarian and hierarchical than was customary in their age—indeed, a society so advanced that a few dared to describe it as “democratical.” They were well ahead of their time in doing so. As Puritans, the colonists also hoped to exemplify a social ethics of equity, peace, and the common good. In a case study of a single town, Hall follows a minister as he encourages the townspeople to live up to these high standards in their politics. This is a book that challenges us to discard long-standing stereotypes of the Puritans as temperamentally authoritarian and their leadership as despotic. Hall demonstrates exactly the opposite. Here, we watch the colonists as they insist on aligning institutions and social practice with equity and liberty. A stunning re-evaluation of the earliest moments of New England’s history, revealing the colonists to be the most effective and daring reformers of their day.

Social Life in Old New England

Social Life in Old New England PDF Author: Mary Caroline Crawford
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Town Born

Town Born PDF Author: Barry Levy
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812241778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists found the New World full of resources. With land readily available but workers in short supply, settlers developed coercive forms of labor—indentured servitude and chattel slavery—in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco. This brutal labor regime became common throughout most of the colonies. An important exception was New England, where settlers and their descendants did most work themselves. In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings were not simply sites of empty democratic rituals but were used to organize, force, and reconcile laborers, families, and entrepreneurs into profitable export economies. The town meetings protected the value of local labor by persistently excluding outsiders and privileging the town born. The town-centered political economy of New England created a large region in which labor earned respect, relative equity ruled, workers exercised political power despite doing the most arduous tasks, and the burdens of work were absorbed by citizens themselves. In a closely observed and well-researched narrative, Town Born reveals how this social order helped create the foundation for American society.

Norwood, Or, Village Life in New England

Norwood, Or, Village Life in New England PDF Author: Henry Ward Beecher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : New England
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Life in a New England Town

Life in a New England Town PDF Author: John Quincy Adams, Former
Publisher: Franklin Classics Trade Press
ISBN: 9780344089480
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Norwood

Norwood PDF Author: Henry Ward Beecher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : New England
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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