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One the idea of community in early massachusetts 1 Community has long been a favorite topic for historians of early New England. Since the seventeenth century, scholars of the region have equated communities with towns, and commitment to the community with land ownership and church membership. The focus on town and religion helped to solidify the image of New England as a homogeneous region in terms of religion, social ethos, political beliefs, and ethnicity. This image began with Puritan ministers and was picked up by later historians who saw New England as the primary culture hearth for the United States, as well as those who looked for consensus in American history. In this framework, dissent and difference in early New England were anomalies that generally led to expulsion and a recommitment to harmony within Puritan communities. Since the 1960s, however, the emphasis on diversity and contention has spawned new ways to look at community and social relationships, allowing historians to see that a certain level of dissent could be tolerated even in the most homogeneous communities as long as it did not threaten basic social institutions. The outpouring of scholarship in the last forty years on diversity in early Massachusetts has drawn attention to the many divisions within Puritan society. Historians now recognize that religious ideals were not monolithic—the New England Way developed out of confrontation and accommodation with dissenters such as Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and Samuel Gorton, as well as from discussions between New England ministers and their counterparts in England .1 The leaders of the colony differed among themselves about the treatment of dissenters, as illustrated by the frequent disputes between John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley over the punishment of Williams and Hutchinson, the rights of freemen and deputies, and the use of authority by magistrates.2 Colony leaders also disagreed about how closely the settlement should be connected to Atlantic trade and communication networks.3 Colonists even held different ideas about both their relationship to England and the authority that the English government and church should wield over the settlement. The zealous and rather rash actions of John Endicott in 1634, for example, when he mutilated the English flag by ripping off the cross of St. George and declaring it idolatry, exposed these fears.4 Nevertheless, the idea of community still frequently conjures images of an idealized small town, perceived by many people as the bastion of American values, whose origins lay in Puritan New England. Although adherence to Congregational principles bound together many, if not most, of the region’s early settlers, scholars of early Massachusetts know that neither the physical geography nor the personal relationships implied by the image of the “New England town” provide accurate characterizations of the time or place. The homogeneous image of the colony was largely constructed by second- and third-generation Congregational ministers trying to build unity in a rapidly changing society, thereby strengthening their own social and political status, and later by nineteenth-century historians to assert the prominence of Anglo-Americans against an influx of immigrants from southern and central Europe and in the face of a rapidly industrializing economy. Even the mental image formed when thinking of seventeenth-century New England—white churches with high steeples on village commons surrounded by white saltbox houses with green shutters—resulted from nineteenth-century beautification efforts to create a New England that had never existed.5 The New England community studies that began to be published in the 1960s, and that have remained a staple in northeastern historiography ever since, focus on towns and villages, dividing the region into localities that can be studied separately and where social interactions can be quantified. Although these studies reshaped our conception of early modern societies, many historians have started to use more flexible definitions of community, where community is seen as “a social network characterized by a distinctive kind of human interaction.”6 More recently, scholars have focused on the idea of “communities of interest,” which refers to the bonds between people based on shared ideology, experiences, or goals. Although communities of interest can exist in a geographically defined space, they frequently transcend such boundaries. In her study of eastern Long Island, which was politically connected to Massachusetts and Connecticut in the seventeenth century, Faren Siminoff argues that as early as the 1630s, “community and identity were already being renegotiated” in New England, based on common the idea of community in early massachusetts u 15 [13.58.112.1] Project MUSE...

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