A Crisis of Community - by Mary Babson Fuhrer Paperback

About the Book

Book Synopsis

In the first decades of the American republic, Mary White, a shopkeeper's wife from rural Boylston, Massachusetts, kept a diary. Woven into its record of everyday events is a remarkable tale of conflict and transformation in small-town life. Sustained by its Puritan heritage, gentry leadership, and sense of common good, Boylston had survived the upheaval of revolution and the creation of the new nation. Then, in a single generation of wrenching change, the town and tis people descended into contentious struggle. Examining the tumultuous Jacksonian era at the intimate level of family and community, Mary Babson Fuhrer brings to life the troublesome creation of a new social, political, and economic order centered on individual striving and voluntary associations in an expansive nation.

Blending family records and a rich trove of community archives, Fuhrer examines the "age of revolutions" through the lens of a rural community that was swept into the networks of an expanding and urbanizing New England region. This finely detailed history lends new depth to our understanding of a key transformative moment in American history.

Review Quotes

"[Fuhrer] is to be commended for breathing new life into the New England community study; what could have been a dry compendium of data has become, in Fuhrer's deft hands, a rich and engaging account." -- Journal of American History

"A loving, almost elegiac depiction of the town of Boylston, Massachusetts, based on a remarkable collection of family papers that allow a detailed reconstruction of the texture of local, family, and personal experience in this nineteenth-century town. A Crisis of Community opens a window onto the workings of household, neighborhood, and town as they moved toward modernity that is hard to match." -- John L. Brooke, author of Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson

"A model for the best local history. . . .By linking a remarkable array of personal documents and public records, Fuhrer turns abstractions into vivid personal stories." -- New England Quarterly

"A thoughtful, humane book on how dramatic changes spurred by the American Revolution and the market revolution reshaped ordinary lives in Boylston, Massachusetts." -- American Historical Review

"The Yankee Calvinist people of the town of Boylston happen to be very interesting. . . . The questions the book raises about political partisanship, the role of religion, the departure of children from the nest, and job security make Fuhrer's book relevant today." -- The Boston Globe

"This excellent microhistory belongs in the collection of all academic institutions. It would also be a worthy acquisition for public libraries. Essential. All levels/libraries." -- CHOICE