Crisis of Community

"Mary White, a shopkeeper's wife from rural Boylston, Massachusetts, kept a diary, and woven into its quotidian details of small-town farm life is a remarkable tale of conflict and transformation. Sustained by its Puritan heritage, gentry leadership, and creed of common good, Boylston had survived the upheaval of revolution and the creation of new republic. Then, quite dramatically, in the course of a single generation of wrenching change - from the 1820s-1840s--families, neighbors, church, and town descended into contentious disorder. Making use of Mary White's diary entries, as well as town minutes, letters, and the "friendship books" of school children, Mary Babson Fuhrer brings to life the unraveling of Boylston's community and the troublesome creation of a new social order, one centered on individual striving and voluntary associations in an expansive nation. Examining the "age of revolutions" through the lens of one rural community that was swept up into the dynamics of an urbanizing east coast, this engaging microhistory lends new depth to our understanding of a key transformative moment in American history. "--