People of the Wachusett

Nashaway became Lancaster, Wachusett became Princeton, and all of Nipmuck County became the county of Worcester. Town by town, New England grew—Watertown, Sudbury, Turkey Hills, Fitchburg, Westminster, Walpole—and with each new community the myth of America flourished.In People of the Wachusett the history of the New England town becomes the cultural history of America's first frontier. Integral to this history are the firsthand narratives of town founders and citizens, English, French, and Native American, whose accounts of trading and warring, relocating and putting down roots proved essential to the building of these communities. Town plans, local records, broadside ballads, vernacular house forms and furniture, festivals—all come into play in this innovative book, giving a rich picture of early Americans creating towns and crafting historical memory. Beginning with the Wachusett, in northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, David Jaffee traces the founding of towns through inland New England and Nova Scotia, from the mid-seventeenth century through the Revolutionary Era. His history of New England's settlement is one in which the replication of towns across the landscape is inextricable from the creation of a regional and national culture, with stories about colonization giving shape and meaning to New England life.

People of the Wachusett is an ambitious book.... The book provides a social history of town creation and development and briefer forays into cultural identity as explored by residents., Contributing to two important trends in recent scholarship—the understanding that the early British colonies were a multiracial society and the analysis of the history of memory—David Jaffee puts a detailed study of east-central Massachusetts into a larger portrait of cultural patterns of Euroamerican settlement between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries., This is an important book whose central conception of serial town settlement as the engine of cultural production in greater New England makes a valuable contribution to New England studies., Jaffee shows the significance of the collected memory of family, household, and village in shaping New England identity. This work contributes to understanding local history in the larger context of regional society and culture., Jaffee's book has the qualities of a synthesis that benefits from the previous mining of social historians. The book is enjoyable to read.

David Jaffee is Associate Professor of History, City College of the City University of New York.