Volume 41, Number 12 · June 23, 1994
Hostages to Fortune
By Edmund S. Morgan
The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
by John Demos
Knopf, 315 pp., $25.00
Paul Revere's Ride
by David Hackett Fischer
Oxford University Press, 445 pp., $27.50
The men and women who occupied the east coast of North America between 1607 and 1800 have been more closely scrutinized than any other collection of people in American history. Their deeds filled the pages of the classic nineteenth-century historians George Bancroft and Francis Parkman (there were not then many other Americans to write about); and they have captured a major share of attention from the most gifted historians of this century, including Perry Miller and Samuel Eliot Morison. New Englanders in particular have been placed under the microscope, their ideas dissected, their psyches probed, and more recently their social relations subjected to sophisticated statistical analyses that tell us more about them than they could have known themselves: their life expectancies, average age at marriage, family size, distribution of wealth, and so on.
Review, 3368 words
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