Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England by Bruce C. Daniels (review)

Book Reviews 193 stalemate (the French faced a humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu) and still no viable noncommunist state. Nonetheless, the United States persevered with the two-pronged policy of intimidation, embodied in Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's call for United Action, and substantial disassociation from the Geneva negotiations. In the end, however, British opposition to United Action, Soviet and Chinese concessions, and the determination of new French leadership to withdraw from Indochina forced Eisenhower and Dulles to accept the partition of Vietnam. That outcome, however, permitted the United States to proceed with directly building its outpost in South Vietnam. Lee)s work stresses the counterrevolutionary, expansive, noncompromising style of American containment policy in East Asia. The overall tone suggests a relentless process driven by the imperatives of a broad definition of national security. This emphasis tends to minimize the influence of individuals , whom Lee sees as mattering only "to a limited extent" (255); yet more attention to the outlook of key policy makers and to the significance of changes in foreign policy leadership in London and Washington would have been instructive. Overall, however, Outposts of Empire, is an impressive and important book. Gary R. Hess Bowling Green State University Bruce C. Daniels. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 221. This is, for the most part, a well-researched, judicious, and lively overview of various forms of recreational and leisure activity in colonial New England from settlement to revolution. Bruce C. Daniels has made good use of unpublished sources, but he also leans heavily upon numerous local studiesbooks and articles-that have appeared in social history during the last thirty years or so. His volume begins, in fact, with an interesting discussion on Puritan historiography that moves from debunkers of the 1920s to revisionists of the thirties, to counterrevisionists of the sixties and seventies, and finally to his own gloss on the role of pleasure as part of the Puritan lifestyle. 194 Canadian Review of Amencan Stu.dies Daniel's thesis is neither new nor startling. Puritans were ambivalent toward leisure and recreation, taking as their guide what Benjamin Colman called, in 1707, the concept of "sober mirth 11 (17). During the early years in New England, "never did the Puritans believe that actions were sinful merely because they were enjoyable" (6). When pleasure became an end in itself, however, it garnered opposition from the entire community. Following the historiographical overview, we find illuminating chapters on reading and literacy, music and theatre, socializing, sex and romance, "alehouse culture, 11 sports and games, and the weakening of the ideological consensus in the face of waning religious intensity during the eighteenth century. "To put the matter simply," says Daniels, "Puritans believed in a strict code of Christian morality that became considerably relaxed over the course of the colonial period 11 (221). But, as with all peoples, what they said and what they did were not always complementary. For such a broad endeavour, there are few glitches or statements startling enough to give one pause. Two such include an assertion, essentially without evidence, that "virtually no early New Englander could read musical notes" (53), an assumption that Harvard students in the seventeenth century were aged between seventeen and twenty-one (207). They were considerably younger. In the chapters on "Dances, Weddings and Dinner Parties," and "Sex and Courtship," two paragraphs based on a published fragment of a diary by Elihu Ashley, of Deerfield, Massachusetts (not "remote"), contain numerous errors and misreadings (119, 135). Ashley, a respectable son of the village parson (not a "cad"), lived with Dr Thomas Williams (not William Williams) while studying medicine; there is no evidence anywhere in the diary that Ashley carried on a "sexual relationship" with his girlfriend Polly (Mary Williams, who lived in the same house, not next door); his horse's tail and reins were cut, not as a wedding prank, but probably for political reasons; it being 1774, there was probably no tea in the kitchen, where, like many other courting couples, they "sat up" night after night, sans chaperons; and Ashley did not refuse to marry. On the...