As one might expect, the number of surviving 17th and 18th century houses is fairly small, and biased towards the houses of the wealthiest and most substantial citizens. In many places they have disappeared entirely under the pressures of redevelopment. The Eleazar Arnold House (left) is a famous example of a 17th Rhode Island century house. This certainly would have been the finest house in its vicinity at the time it was built, regardless of how medieval or "quaint" it looks. Click on the picture for other examples of 17th century New England houses.
Chapter 1, The Colonial Encounter With the Land, pp. 9 - 51.
Notes on Reading.
I'm assuming that many, if not most, of you have been pretty absorbed in completing your first paper, so I'm going to slow down the reading in The New England Village a bit. I know it can be dense going, but I'm hoping as you get used to his vocabulary and techniques you'll find him easier going. I hope our discussion Monday on the relativity of terms like "near" and "large" and "crowded" will help us making sense of this chapter and others, as well. Thinking about the book, its organization, and its techniques, I'm thinking some of you may benefit by the following strategy.
Before plowing into each assignment, take a few minutes to meditate on just the bold faced chapter introduction. In chapter one, this appears on page 9. There are a couple of terms which may make your eyes spin: for example diachronic and synchronic. At first don't worry about these. Read the rest of the introduction and ask yourselves, do I really need to know what diachronic and synchronic mean, or can I understand "I argue that New England's settlers were well prepared to employ New England's grasslands--you can see these salt marshes and freshwater meadows flying over New England today". and "Furthermore it was division of grasslands more than it was covenanted community, puritan ideology, or defensive precautions that shaped human geographical patterns and forms of agricultural settlement. New Englanders built New England villages on the human geographical foundations established by the first settlers raising cattle". anyhow?
If you get the gist of what follows, you can forget worrying about "diachronic" and "synchronic".
If you aren't quite sure about what "covenanted community, puritan precautions, or defensive precautions" mean, remember that he's saying that these did not shape the New England Village. Do you really need to understand these in order to understand what the last sentence (his thesis) says? If not, then you can decide to worry about those terms later. He may explain them in the chapter, or he may not. But knowing much about them in detail may not be all that important.
Once you've performed those preliminary meditations, proceed to spend a couple of minutes looking at the chapter subheadings. In Chapter one, these are:
The Exceptionalist Tradition
Cultural Context
Emigrants
Puritanism
The New England Experience
Land Types
Settling Land
Shaping New England's Cultural Geography
The Settlement Landscape
A Settlement Utopia
Some of these you may already know something about, some of them not. What you're doing at this point is trying to identify the places in the chapter which are likely to be more troublesome, and those parts which are likely to be less so.
Next, turn your attention to the illustrations and the captions!!!
First, do you understand the key to the maps or charts? If not, formulate questions which will help clarify what they mean, and make sure to ask those questions either in class or by e-mail.
Second, for figures which more or less illustrate the same point. Consider, for example, Figs 1.3, 1,5, 1.6, and 1.7. Do the captions of these illustrations direct your attention to the same things? Notice that he repeats the words Salt Marsh in three of the four of these. Is there a similar area in the other? (You'll probably notice that Fig. 1.4 also is captioned "salt marsh". From this, you can probably determine that salt marsh is pretty important.
Consider specialist terms in the illustrations which might be unfamiliar to you. For example "Glacio-lacustrine zone" appears in the text of Figures 1,9 and 1.10. Do you need to know the technical definition? Notice that with each illustration he discusses meadows. It would seem that meadows and glacio-lacustrine zones have something to do with each other. Perhaps "meadows" is all you need to know.
Figures 1.11 and 1.12 illustrate "intervales", one of which is "small". Can you guess what an "intervale" is from the information in the illustrations? If you do decide you really need to be sure you understand intervale, that's the time to use a dictionary. I like to use online ones, myself.
Next. give your brain a rest. Grab a coffee, a coke, and/or a cookie, listen to your i-pod or spend some time on FaceBook. Try not to think about the chapter. (Try NOT thinking about a pink elephant in ballet slippers sometime...and you'll see the advantage of the not thinking technique)..
Finally, read the chapter briskly. Don't get hung up on the technical language, note any troublesome points, form questions about them--as specific as possible--and bring them with you to class.
For Wednesday, October 5
Read, In Joseph Wood,
Chapter 2, Village and Community in the 17th Century, pp. 52 - 70
You will need to understand what a "village" is, and note that this term is not synonymous with "town". Make sure you understand the relationship betweentowns andvillages.
Two types of village are noted in this chapter, and you will have to be able to distinguish between the Nucleated and Dispersedtypes. We've talked about this a little before. You should have a sense of what kinds of conditions called each type into being, and also a sense of which type predominated.
The relationship between village and community is also important, and will become even more important when we begin using our next book, "A Very Social Time".
Two views of Ludlow Village, Vermont. Population (1990) 1123. Here's another chance for you to exercise your imagination. Can you orient yourself mentally to relate the perspectives of the topographical map (left) and the historic bird's eye view (above, left) to each other? For a little help with making that mental maneuver, try looking at
or prowl around further with google earth. Don't have it? Download it for free.
Finally, try to find an illustration of at least one Village scene to confirm you understand the difference. Browse around the resources above. You might also look on Panoramio
For Monday, October 3
Read, In The New England Village,
Chapter 3: The Architectural Landscape, pp. 71-87
In this chapter, Wood questions whether our picture of 18th century domestic architecture is accurate. If not, what did the average 18th century house look like? As one might expect, wealth and length of community settlement determines the answer. I don't expect you to master all the technical statistics in this chapter, so don't let them overwhelm you. Do concentrate on the descriptive data on the range of house size and house value (pp. 74-78). We'll take a closer look a this issue when we add Out Own Snug Fireside to our reading agenda.
Illustration 3.8 (p. 84) is less confusing than it looks at first. The size of the circles indicates the number of houses in the towns surveyed. Black areas represent two story houses and white areas one-story houses.
For Friday, October 7
The Hooper house to the right is an eighteenth century gentleman's house. Most of the houses in its vicinity would have been far less substantial and elegant. Houses of this quality generally have survived in towns which, for reasons we'll come to understand later, experienced long periods of economic stagnation. Bristol was such a town, which explains why so much of its early architecture survives. Click on the photo to see more examples of 18th century New England architecture.
Chapter 1, The Colonial Encounter With the Land, pp. 9 - 51. 
