Another inference Demos draws is that the distribution of land by newer townships to almost anyone who proposed to move in, as against the earlier plan to restrict land grants only to upright, religious-minded settlers, laid the foundation for cultural evolution through social mobility. In a similar vein, the prospect of new land served to disperse families with the younger generation either rejecting their modest inheritance to seek their fortunes elsewhere or being given land in a new township or frontier area. From these and other facts, Demos makes it evident that the Pilgrim families were keen to distinguish themselves along the lines of wealth and status, thereby laying the foundation for America to develop along the lines of heterogeneous immigrant groups, enterprise and individualism. Demos's focus on cultural changes wrought by a new environment succeeds in highlighting the evolved status of women as well. Noting a trend towards an expansion of the rights of married women to hold property, in family decision making, and even in certain types of business activity such as the management of inns and taverns, Demos points out a growing equality of the sexes in Plymouth, as compared to many parts of Europe where a wife was still quite literally at the mercy of her husband. Although Demos sets out to showcase how everyday family life in Plymouth reflected cultural change from the Old World habitat, his analysis is objective enough to acknowledge areas where there was little or no change. To name just one example, his descriptions of children...
Child rearing, it appears, was one of the areas where lines of authority were maintained to the extent of suppressing individualism and desire for autonomy.
Demos-Commonwealth "a Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony" by John Demos John Demos' A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony takes place in the New World with the settlement of the Plymouth colony. Although quite a significant portion of the text is dedicated to the material aspects of the settlement, Demos outlines from the beginning of the foreword, his intentions to take an intimate look at the family in an
17th century, a book inspired by Sir Walter Raleigh and written by Richard Hakluyt, entitled "Western Planting," built up great interest in American colonization. Focus of commercial explorations was possible trade with the East India Company for the West. The King of England formed and granted a royal charter to the London Company and the Plymouth Company (Interesting.com) to found a colony. In December 1606, the London Company, led
But by the year of the revolution, the "various forces of discord between Britain and American had combined, and," Adams continues on page 84, the result of those forces of discord "…did not take the direction which would have found a place for the thirteen colonies within the British Empire Commonwealth" (Adams, 84). The Trade acts and Navigation acts were "extremely galling," Adams comments on page 85, and King
In this sense, the only category of convicts which were burned to death was that of the so-called "satanic Blacks" as this was considered to be the only way of destroying their 'evilness.' In Puritan New England ideology, Blacks were associated with Satan. This belief was the remnant of an old European image of Satan as a black man which dated back to long before the contact between Africans
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