“Tradition and history are not the same concepts. Traditions are conventions that evolve. Traditions are the pasts we make in the present. The New England tradition of large colonial houses encircling town commons to form puritan villages was invented in the nineteenth century and Michael Steinitz and I here employ a four stage model to explain how."
Make sure you understand the difference between "history" and "tradition". Make sure you can describe the four stages in the Steinitz-Wood model, applying them as much as you can to the towns which are used to describe this process.
Read, in Wood,
Chapter 7. "A World We Have Gained." pp. 161- 180
Above and below, views of a place many of you are coming to know quite well. They link to the panoramic map from which I extracted them. We'll take some time to view these in class, as well, and perhaps also see what's changed, using one of our modern tools. Is this a vernacular landscape? Traditional? Historical? How about today, thinking of the buildings which have vanished.?
For Wednesday, October 26
For Friday, October 28
I warned you last week that this week we'd start book juggling in earnest. I hope you see the logic of this by the end of Friday's class. Today, we'll have our first introduction to Jane Nylander's Our Own Snug Fireside, and Friday, we'll add Karen Hansen's A Very Social Time to our repertoire.
For today, read, in Nylander,
Preface, Great Neatness and Conveniencepp. ix - xiv
Chapter I, Introduction: Glimpses of the New England Home pp. 3-19
Chapter II, Our Great Family, pp. 20 -53
Read, in Hanson, Acknowledgments, Author's Note, pp. xi-xv
Making the Social Central : An Introduction, pp. 1-28
The illustrations are gathered together in the center of the book (boo on this technique). Take a few minutes to look at them.
This book explores the intersection between reality and reminiscence
Nylander's beginning seems to be uniquely appropriate to succeed Joseph Wood's study of the New England Village, for here, too, we look at New England life as it was and as it was imagined to be. No book is perfect. Nylander's book has been criticized for dwelling too extensively on the elite of New England. This may be at least part a problem of the nature of remaining evidence. Remember Wood told us that the smaller, more humble houses were most likely to be destroyed. The owners of such houses were probably also the ones least likely to leave behind the kind of visual evidence with which Nylander is chock full. Pay particular attention to the illustrations in the early pages. I want you to be mindful of three things in addition to the content of the illustrations. First, note the date of the illustration. Second, note the source of the illustration. Third, note the current repository of the illustration. When you've pondered them individually, see if you can theorize ab out what this evidence may be telling us. The content may be giving us the same information in a different form.
We'll begin our look at family and community with Nylander's exposition of what she calls a "Great" family. We'll quickly realize that great describes numbers, not qualities. We've mentioned before that many more people occupied a New England house in days past than occupies a typical New England house now. We have to turn this from an abstraction into something more real... considering the various generations within the family structure, for one thing, and also considering "kin": the collateral relatives (aunts, uncles, and cousins) who quite often found themselves part of the family unit as well. Finally, we'll have to consider those who bore no blood relationship to the "help". Pay attention to the age at which children frequently left their own families to live with those to whom they were hired out. Any theories about this? Thy "why"? The "effect"?
Pay particular attention to the illustrations. Some of them are romantic realizations. Others are more realistic portrayals of some of the advantages (and disadvantages) of living within a large group. Pay some attention to the life cycle, which is laid out for you with some care. It will take some act of creative imagination to bring this to life, and I hope you'll employ your empathy to get inside the stories of these New England Families.
The acknowledgments and author's notes will explain the author's interests and methodology, including the editorial process (remember we considered this in the case of William Wood's book as edited by Alden Vaughn).
Chapter One suggests that while we normally divide human activity in to private and public spheres, there are actually three spheres, rather than just two. We need to consider the social sphere apart from the public and private. Make sure that you understand how Ms. Hansen defines these. The key section begins on p. 7.
When you look at the illustrations, try to develop both empathy with and curiosity about the subjects posing for them. Note that the sources of these illustrations are similar to the sources for the illustrations in Ms. Nylander's book, but the content in them is different. We'll perhaps want to discuss this a bit.
A large colonial era house in Connecticut. As Wood said, it was the largest and most magnificent of the colonial houses which survived. Many of them have been documented in the Historic American Buildings Survey. These are being ditized and added to the Internet on a regular basis. Click the image above to visit the website.
“Tradition and history are not the same concepts. Traditions are conventions that evolve. Traditions are the pasts we make in the present. The New England tradition of large colonial houses encircling town commons to form puritan villages was invented in the nineteenth century and Michael Steinitz and I here employ a four stage model to explain how." 
