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.
