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A groundbreaking study in colonial history, this book gives a remarkably detailed picture of life in an early American community. It focuses on three basic and interrelated subjects largely neglected by historians—population, land, and the family—as they affected the lives of four successive generations. Applying demographic methods to historical research, Professor Greven presents new and unexpected evidence about the most basic aspects of family life in colonial America, and shows how these characteristics changed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Religious roots of punishment and phychological impact of physical abuse.
Bringing together an extraordinary richness of evidence—from letters, diaries, and other intimate family records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Philip Greven explores the strikingly distinctive ways in which Protestant children were reared in America. In tracing the hidden continuities of religious experience, of attitudes toward God, children, the self, sexuality, pleasure, virtue, and achievement, Greven identifies three distinct Protestant temperaments prevailing among Americans at the time: the Evangelical, the Moderate, and the General. The Protestant Temperament is a powerful reassessment of the role of child-rearing and religion in early American life.
Examining the aspects of childhood in the American colonies between the late 16th and late 18th centuries, this text contains essays and documents that shed light on the ways in which the process of colonisation shaped childhood, and in turn how the experience of children affected life in colonial America.
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This revealing, disturbing, and thoroughly researched book exposes a dark side of faith that most Americans do not know exists or have ignored for a long time—religious child maltreatment. After speaking with dozens of victims, perpetrators, and experts, and reviewing a myriad of court cases and studies, the author explains how religious child maltreatment happens. She then takes an in-depth look at the many forms of child maltreatment found in religious contexts, including biblically-prescribed corporal punishment and beliefs about the necessity of "breaking the wills" of children; scaring kids into faith and other types of emotional maltreatment such as spurning, isolating, and withholdi...
Bringing together an extraordinary richness of evidence—from letters, diaries, and other intimate family writing of the 17th and 18th centuries—Philip Greven, the distinguished scholar of colonial history explores the strikingly distinctive ways in which Protestant children were reared, and the Protestant temperament shaped, in America. Through this cache of remarkable and remarkably immediate and moving material – the family papers of some of America’s most famous theologians, political figures, lawyers, and ministers as well as those of lesser-known contemporaries (farmers, merchants, housewives) who embodied Protestant life and wrote about it most expressively—Philip Greven trac...
This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New Englanders broke ranks with family, neighbors, and ministers who dismissed their religious experiences as d...
Examining the lives of 460 of the wealthiest men who lived in colonial Maryland, Burnard traces the development of this elite from a hard-living, profit-driven merchant-planter class in the seventeenth century to a more genteel class of plantation owners in the eighteenth century. This study innovatively compares these men to their counterparts elsewhere in the British Empire, including absentee Caribbean landowners and East Indian nabobs, illustrating their place in the Atlantic economic network.