Volume 31, Number 21 & 22 · January 17, 1985
Our Town
By Edmund S. Morgan
A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650–1750
by Darrett B., by Anita H. Rutman
Norton, 287 pp., $19.95
A Place in Time: Explicatus
by Darrett B., by Anita H. Rutman
Norton, 207 pp., $30.00
The colonial period has been the proving ground in America for the new social history, which concentrates on the ordinary doings of ordinary people rather than on high culture and high politics. Unfortunately ordinary people, almost by definition, leave behind only faint traces of their existence. Until very recently most ordinary people could neither read nor write, and their lives have to be reconstituted from the way they appear in records kept by their not-so-ordinary contemporaries.
Review, 2655 words
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