17th-century American Women: Recreating 17th-Century America

How this blog works

President John Adams declared, “History is not the Province of the Ladies.” Oh well, I'll give it a try. Images & essays cluster around some chronological, social, cultural, or academic theme. Because I am a boring, old historian, I am interested in comparing & contrasting & looking at change over time. I try to choose images that justify their inclusion on aesthetic grounds. I do not offer complete image credit lines or footnotes, as my goal is to entice blog visitors to begin researching for themselves. (Graded enough papers as a TA to know that some undergrads are tempted to borrow.)

About this blog

This blog will focus on how the lives of women living in the British American colonies on the Atlantic coast changed over the 17th century. I will try to use first-hand accounts whenever possible; so that the reader can compare & contrast those changes over time.

History is certainly not a science. It is not the absolute truth. It is constantly changing as new evidence & new interpretations flash into view. As those looking at history peel away the tired, old suppositions, they add new (but soon to grow old) assumptions of their own.

History reflects not just the prejudices of the period under study, but also the biases of those studying it. Since each person who focuses on a historical period brings a different perspective to the task, historians often interpret the same period of the past in vastly different ways.

History before 1800 is often skewed; because only the few, the powerful, and the wealthy kept written records of events. And yet, events only advance & take a particular shape, because of the everyday actions of the nameless many who give them the energy to move forward.

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Using Primary Sources

This blog will use as much original evidence as possible to allow the reader to draw conclusions.

Primary sources can give us a sense of the real differences between the past and the present; a context for understanding how ideas came about at a certain place in time; a realization that there are few neat linear narratives; a recognition of how our concept of the past has been shaped by people who have written about it.

Primary sources are documents or artifacts created during the time being studied or shortly after by a participant as a memoir. They are infused with the fleeting spirit of the time in which they were created. First-hand accounts bring a human voice to history, but they surely do not speak for themselves, they must be interpreted.

Primary sources force us to ask what those who created these surviving records must have believed or desired or deemed valuable in order to understand their ideas and actions.

Primary sources urge us to question the historical conclusions of others. For a study of 17th century America, surviving manuscripts, letters, diaries, & journals; ship logs; court, church & land records; and artifacts such as portraits & archaelogical finds, are the original evidence needed to compile good history.

Good history results from the examination of countless primary sources to reach a general conclusion about a time period or event. Good history is not deciding a conclusion in advance and then picking only those sources which support that foregone interpretation.

The "least-best" theory of collecting the least amount of the best evidence to construct a convincing argument about an issue may be expedient in mathematics, but it does not work well in any serious study of history. Without gathering a hefty quantity of primary source evidence, how can the historian determine which is the best evidence?

Good history is not based on one or two anecdotal incidents or descriptions manipulated into a generalized conclusion about the whole.

In this blog, we will be looking at snippets of history. Exploring individual anecdotal incidents may be fun; but they are not good history, until they are woven into the whole.

17th-century American Women

Friday, June 3, 2011

Recreating 17th-Century America

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