A Crisis of Community

“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

“[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

“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

“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

“This account of Boylston, Massachusetts, over three decades of wrenching change tells the dramatic story of how a social order that was founded by Puritans in the seventeenth century and that managed to survive the upheaval of revolution and the creation of a republic in the eighteenth century came apart unexpectedly in the course of a single generation, during the 1820s and 1830s. Fuhrer charts a transition from community to individualism, but in her telling, this familiar saga takes on a remarkable subtlety and richness. What could be more pertinent to Americans of the twenty-first century experiencing similar mixed feelings of excitement and unsettlement at the globalizing forces of our time — forces that first took off in the world of Boylston nearly two centuries ago?” — Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut

“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