The Wall and the Garden was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The election day sermon in colonial New England was an annual, formal address by a minister of the gospel to the newly assembled legislature of the colony. The tradition began in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1634, and it continued, in Boston, for 250 years. In this volume, Professor Plumstead presents a collection of nine of the Massachusetts election sermons, chosen from among the surviving Massachusetts sermons which were printed between 1661 and 1775. They are not chosen as representative but, rather, as the best, judged on a basis of literary excellence and ideas and points of style relevant to later developments in American literature and history. There are changes in style and theme in the 105 years between the first and the last selection, and, in his brief introduction to each of the sermons, the editor discusses these changes and the sermon's relationship to the tradition as a whole.
In a general introduction, Professor Plumstead provides background information about the history and significance of the election sermons. As he makes clear, the election sermon tradition offers a vantage point for seeing both continuity and change in colonial intellectual history. The sermons in this collection will complement colonial studies by bringing the reader close to the spirit of the times.
The title of the volume, The Wall and the Garden, derives from the frequent use by colonial preachers of the metaphors of the garden and the wall to describe the colonies and their spiritual enemies.
The lyceum movement gained momentum in the decades preceding the Civil War, presenting members with the opportunity to participate in literary life and engage with the issues of the day. While urban lyceums played host to a who’s who of nineteenth-century intellectual life, literary societies also cropped up in thousands of villages across the nation, acting as influential sites of learning, creativity, and community engagement. In rural New England, ordinary men and women, farmers and intelligentsia, selectmen and schoolchildren came together to write and perform poetry and witty parodies and debate a wide range of topics, from women’s rights and temperance to slavery, migration, and more.
Wit and Wisdom takes readers inside this long-forgotten tradition, providing new access to the vibrant voices, surprising talents, and understated humor on display on many a cold winter’s night. Having uncovered dozens of handwritten newspapers produced by village lyceums across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, Joan Newlon Radner proves that these close-knit groups offered a vital expression of the beliefs, ambitions, and resilience of rural New Englanders.
An intimate look inside Plymouth Plantation that goes beyond familiar founding myths to portray real life in the settlement—the hard work, small joys, and deep connections to others beyond the shores of Cape Cod Bay.
The English settlement at Plymouth has usually been seen in isolation. Indeed, the colonists gain our admiration in part because we envision them arriving on a desolate, frozen shore, far from assistance and forced to endure a deadly first winter alone. Yet Plymouth was, from its first year, a place connected to other places. Going beyond the tales we learned from schoolbooks, Carla Gardina Pestana offers an illuminating account of life in Plymouth Plantation.
The colony was embedded in a network of trade and sociability. The Wampanoag, whose abandoned village the new arrivals used for their first settlement, were the first among many people the English encountered and upon whom they came to rely. The colonists interacted with fishermen, merchants, investors, and numerous others who passed through the region. Plymouth was thereby linked to England, Europe, the Caribbean, Virginia, the American interior, and the coastal ports of West Africa. Pestana also draws out many colorful stories—of stolen red stockings, a teenager playing with gunpowder aboard ship, the gift of a chicken hurried through the woods to a sickbed. These moments speak intimately of the early North American experience beyond familiar events like the first Thanksgiving.
On the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing and the establishment of the settlement, The World of Plymouth Plantation recovers the sense of real life there and sets the colony properly within global history.
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