Thomas Dennis emigrated to America from England in 1663, settling in Ipswich, a Massachusetts village a long day's sail north of Boston. He had apprenticed in joinery, the most common method of making furniture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, and he became Ipswich's second joiner, setting up shop in the heart of the village. During his lifetime, Dennis won wide renown as an artisan. Today, connoisseurs judge his elaborately carved furniture as among the best produced in seventeenth-century America. Robert Tarule, historian and accomplished craftsman, brilliantly recreates Dennis's world in recounting how he created a single oak chest. Writing as a woodworker himself, Tarule vividly portrays Dennis walking through the woods looking for the right trees; sawing and splitting the wood on site; and working in his shop on the chest—planing, joining, and carving. Dennis inherited a knowledge of wood and woodworking that dated back centuries before he was born, and Tarule traces this tradition from Old World to New. He also depicts the natural and social landscape in which Dennis operated, from the sights, sounds, and smells of colonial Ipswich and its surrounding countryside to the laws that governed his use of trees and his network of personal and professional relationships. Thomas Dennis embodies a world that had begun to disappear even during his lifetime, one that today may seem unimaginably distant. Imaginatively conceived and elegantly executed, The Artisan of Ipswich gives readers a tangible understanding of that distant past.

Winner of the New England Historical Association’s James P. Hanlan Book Award Winner the Association for the Study of Connecticut History’s Homer D. Babbidge Jr. Award “Incomparably vivid . . . as enthralling a portrait of family life [in colonial New England] as we are likely to have.”—Wall Street Journal In the tradition of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s classic, A Midwife’s Tale, comes this groundbreaking narrative by one of America’s most promising colonial historians. Joshua Hempstead was a well-respected farmer and tradesman in New London, Connecticut. As his remarkable diary—kept from 1711 until 1758—reveals, he was also a slave owner who owned Adam Jackson for over thirty years. In this engrossing narrative of family life and the slave experience in the colonial North, Allegra di Bonaventura describes the complexity of this master/slave relationship and traces the intertwining stories of two families until the eve of the Revolution. Slavery is often left out of our collective memory of New England’s history, but it was hugely impactful on the central unit of colonial life: the family. In every corner, the lines between slavery and freedom were blurred as families across the social spectrum fought to survive. In this enlightening study, a new portrait of an era emerges.

The seventeenth century saw an influx of immigrants to the heavily Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. This book redefines the role that non-Puritans and non-English immigrants played in the social and economic development of Massachusetts. Marsha Hamilton shows how non-Puritan English, Scots, and Irish immigrants, along with Channel Islanders, Huguenots, and others, changed the social and economic dynamic of the colony. A chronic labor shortage in early Massachusetts allowed many non-Puritans to establish themselves in the colony, providing a foundation upon which later immigrants built transatlantic economic networks. Scholars of the era have concluded that these “strangers” assimilated into the Puritan structure and had little influence on colonial development; however, through an in-depth examination of each group’s activity in local affairs, Marsha Hamilton asserts a much different conclusion. By mining court, town, and company records, letters, and public documents, Hamilton uncovers the impact that these immigrants had on the colony, not only by adding to the diversity and complexity of society but also by developing strong economic networks that helped bring the Bay Colony into the wider Atlantic world. These groups opened up important mercantile networks between their own homelands and allies, and by creating their own communities within larger Puritan networks, they helped create the provincial identity that led the colony into the eighteenth century.

The Global Lives of Things considers the ways in which ‘things’, ranging from commodities to works of art and precious materials, participated in the shaping of global connections in the period 1400-1800. By focusing on the material exchange between Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia, this volume traces the movements of objects through human networks of commerce, colonialism and consumption. It argues that material objects mediated between the forces of global economic exchange and the constantly changing identities of individuals, as they were drawn into global circuits. It proposes a reconceptualization of early modern global history in the light of its material culture by asking the question: what can we learn about the early modern world by studying its objects? This exciting new collection draws together the latest scholarship in the study of material culture and offers students a critique and explanation of the notion of commodity and a reinterpretation of the meaning of exchange. It engages with the concepts of ‘proto-globalization’, ‘the first global age’ and ‘commodities/consumption’. Divided into three parts, the volume considers in Part One, Objects of Global Knowledge, in Part Two, Objects of Global Connections, and finally, in Part Three, Objects of Global Consumption. The collection concludes with afterwords from three of the leading historians in the field, Maxine Berg, Suraiya Faroqhi and Paula Findlen, who offer their critical view of the methodologies and themes considered in the book and place its arguments within the wider field of scholarship. Extensively illustrated, and with chapters examining case studies from Northern Europe to China and Australia, this book will be essential reading for students of global history.

This volume offers a complete listing and description of books published on early America between 2001 and 2005. An extraordinary research tool, Books on Early American History and Culture, 2001-2005: An Annotated Bibliography is part of a series listing materials on the history of North America and the Caribbean from 1492 to 1815. This volume includes monographs, reference works, exhibition catalogs, and essay collections published between 2001 and 2005. Each entry provides the name of the work, its author(s) or editor(s), publisher, date of publication, ISBN and/or OCLC number(s), and the Library of Congress call number. Following each detailed citation, there is a brief summary of the work and a list of journals in which it has been reviewed. Organized thematically, the book covers, among many other topics, exploration and colonization; maritime history; environment; Native Americans; race, gender, and ethnicity; migration; labor and class; business; families; religion; material culture; science; education; politics; and military affairs.

This book explores the development of a provincial textile industry in colonial America. Immediately after the end of the Great Migration into the Massachusetts Bay colony, settlers found themselves in a textile crisis. They were not able to generate the kind of export commodities that would enable them to import English textiles in the quantities they required. This study examines the promotion of domestic textile manufacture from the level of the Massachusetts legislature down to the way in which individual communities organized individual productive efforts. Although other historians have examined early cloth production in colonial homes, they have tended to dismiss domestic cloth-making as a casual activity among family members rather than a concerted community effort at economic development. This study looks closely at the networks of production and examines the methods that households and communities organized themselves to meet a very critical need for cloth of all kinds. It is a social history of cloth-making that also employs the economic and political elements of Massachusetts Bay to tell their story.

Census returns provide a detailed information about patterns of religious life in 19c Suffolk, revealing much about both orthodox Anglicanism and Dissent. The reader is in John Clare's world... Every county should publish its Census and see that it is done as excellently as that for Suffolk. RONALD BLYTHE, CHURCH TIMES The census returns edited in this volume provide a unique sample of mid nineteenth-century religious life. They are printed in calendared form, and their findings set in local and national context; information about land and property ownership is supplied, making it possible to compare patterns of ownership in most parishes with the presence or absence of Dissent. Chapel dates are collated with those in meeting-house certificates and printed notices, while much detail refused by Anglican clergymen is recovered, together with communicant numbers and/or information about the frequency of Holy Communion. The appendices present the evidence about places of worship omitted, and contain facsimiles of the census forms. T.C.B. TIMMINS has prepared editions of two volumes of church registers: of John Chandler, Dean of Salisbury, 1404-17, and John Waltham, Bishop of Salisbury, 1388-1395.