The Minutemen and Their World

“Social history, like any other branch of history, should be accessible to as wide an audience as possible, for it deals with everyday, fundamental experiences of human life—with work and play, with growing up and raising families, with growing old and facing death. It thereby provides us with our closest points of contact with men and women of the past. By seeing how earlier Americans have lived and struggled in their daily lives, we can come to recognize them as people like ourselves and gain a new understanding of our society and our heritage.” 

Here, the author provides a concise reasoning for his approach to writing history. Though he is an academic researcher, his intended audience includes both scholars and non-academics. He cites a continuity between the society he describes and the society that readers live in, which implies that he is writing for Americans. One of the reasons to read and write history, according to this statement, is that understanding the past can be applied to the present. The invocation of “our society and our heritage” implies a shared identity among the book’s intended readership, and perhaps suggests that by examining 18th-century Concord social life, readers might recognize and strengthen the bonds that connect them.

“The movements of population reflected a regular adjustment of social life to the changing seasons. Men and women stirred at the deepest levels to nature’s spring renewal. In the town clerk’s register, one reads the evidence: every year April through June was the most common time to conceive, as indicated by recorded births nine months later. During the hot summer of exhausting labor in the fields and the succeeding rush to harvest, conception fell to an annual low. It rose to a secondary peak in autumn when families could relax and enjoy the feeling of plenitude a good harvest brought; decline set in again during the long winter night. Marriage followed another rhythm, surging in May and in November and December, traditional months for Christian celebration. Death had its own seasons that mocked the promise of late autumn and spring. Infants were likely to enter the world during the periodic killing times: not only the bitter winters but also the summers when, as Concord’s pastor Emerson noted in 1775, ‘Many were sick with dysentery—sickness continues and increases and in general prevails in this and other Colonies.’” 

Here, the often-harsh realities of 18th-century American life are portrayed as existing in harmony with the natural rhythms of the seasons. The community portrayed here is one with a deep sense of place, and the specific conditions of the surrounding areas were the most important influences on how Concordians lived their lives, with the religious calendar a distant second. This quote conveys the degree to which the residents of Concord were disconnected from regional and global political trends, at least on the day-to-day level.