“From which patterns of everyday life and social change would emerge”

Back in April the Concord Bridge published a nice retrospective profile of Robert Gross, author of The Minutemen and Their World.

Published in 1976 and recently updated, that book has proved the most lasting of the New England community studies that came out in the middle of the twentieth century.

No doubt Minutemen gets a boost from its connection to the nation’s origin story, but it’s a really good book that offers both an early example of computer-aided data analysis and interesting new ideas about how generations interact.

Plus individual stories, as the article says:

Gross wanted to write about “men, women, free and slave, native and newcomer, patriot, neutral, and loyalist” — all of those who had been excluded from conventional accounts — recovering their voices. His approach would reflect his interest in social history, a method that was growing in popularity. It involved tapping overlooked sources such as tax lists, censuses, vital records, genealogies, and town meeting minutes, from which patterns of everyday life and social change would emerge, he says.

Among those who people “Minutemen” is John Jack, an enslaved man who worked for a cobbler, bought his freedom, built a cabin in Great Meadows, and paid his taxes, but was never allowed to vote. At the time of Jack’s death, he owned eight acres, a pair of oxen, and seven barrels of cider. “His was a marginal place in the community, but it was nonetheless a real place,” Gross writes.

And there is Lucy Barnes Hosmer, daughter of a prosperous farmer and town clerk. When Joseph Hosmer, a cabinet maker, asked for permission to marry 16-year-old Lucy, her father refused, wanting her to wed someone wealthy and important.

Though a father could not dictate his daughter’s choice of spouse, he could try to arrange unions and pressure her to agree, Gross says. Lucy rebelled, denying her father’s choice of a cousin for her, and acted on her own. When she married Hosmer at 19, she was two months pregnant.

Highlighting people like that reflects the appeal of such human detail in a study of a society, a balance that The Minutemen and Their World achieved.