Customer Reviews

Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony

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This is a densely packed little book. I was very glad to come across it, personally. I am rather tired with every book I pick up about the Puritans being a psychological deconstruction. This straight-forward book, instead, is full of facts, personal accounts, item inventories, drawings and diagrams that are extremely helpful in getting a picture of how these people lived, centuries ago.

This is an old book, first published in 1935, but it doesn't make it any less relevant today. Every area of life is considered, from the voyage to New England down to sports and games. Many documents are presented without any commentary at all, and you can come to your own conclusions.

The illustrations are many and are helpful alongside the text to bring these people to life.

Whether you're a student of history or a genealogist, if you're interested in this era at all there is no reason not to own this book. Some people think that the Masschusetts Bay Colony gets little attention compared to Plymouth and Virginia. Whether that's true or not, Everyday Life will give you instant insight into the colony and the colonists personal lives.

This book is not a coherent narrative. Each chapter covers a different topic, some of which are quite interesting (the chapter on housing, for example). Others, however, consist of nothing but long lists which represent inventories or catalogs, including such items as fabric types and medical remedies. These can be MANY pages in length, and should be considered more in the way of source material than analysis or narrative.

As a result what's here is a mixture of highly enjoyable and tedium. If you're researching early fabric types or medical remedies, the lists might be just what you need. If not, you'll find yourself skipping a lot of pages. I'm not planning on getting rid of the book, but it's much more of a research tool than anything else.