Mark Peterson's Reading List

"The New England Mind is a work of profound scholarship. For much of the nineteenth century, the Puritans who founded New England were dismissed by their descendants as a retrograde people; so much so that the word ‘puritan’ was a term of abuse. Miller, a professor at Harvard, showed that the Puritan founders were actually an incredibly learned group who led the Reformation and were at the forefront of seventeenth-century scientific thought. Miller rehabilitated the Puritans and in so doing, transformed the twentieth-century understanding of America’s origins. The New England Mind is a sprawling, two-volume work; no one is going to take it to the beach. But if anyone is interested in exploring the modern foundations of how we understand New England, it’s indispensable reading. The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s success was built on Puritan colonists’ ability to develop a thriving economy. To sustain a religious culture, including learned clergymen and cultured congregants, Puritans needed wealth. The cost of shipping during the Age of Sail was so high that Puritans could only profit from voyages that carried high-value commodities. But New England’s climate and conditions didn’t yield any commodity that remained in sustained demand. Colonists had to find a place to sell what they could produce, simple farm products and salted meats. And they had to find a place where merchants could then buy goods someone in London would want. This is where the West Indies came in; sugar plantations needed food for slaves, plus barrels and wood products. “The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s success was built on Puritan colonists’ ability to develop a thriving economy” To sustain this trade, merchants needed some form of currency. So, from the very beginning, Boston merchants became creative. At first, they adopted wampum, which they wrongly believed was Indian money. Then, they melted down Spanish silver and started coining New England’s own money. No other colony did this; it was most likely illegal. It was the beginning of experimental finance. That’s the way Boston became a financial center."

"I admire Phillis Wheatley’s poetry and her personal journey. Enslaved at a young age in West Africa, she came to Boston and was sold, at roughly seven, to a family headed by John Wheatley. Wheatley’s wife, Susanna, recognized she was remarkably smart and so encouraged her studies. By the time Phillis was an adolescent, she was writing remarkable poetry. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter To read Wheatley is to understand the world she lived in. She wrote many odes, the great poetic genre of the period. She also wrote topical poems. Although young, she was an astute observer. In her poetry and in her person, Wheatley adopted New England ideals. Although born in Africa and enslaved as a child, she used her talent and education to write her way to fame and freedom. She speaks as the voice of New England about “our liberties” being preserved, in a poem addressed to the Earl of Dartmouth. Yes and no. The abolitionist movement did take root in New England starting in the late 1820s, but it had roots in other places as well. So, ‘export’ is not the word I would use. The City-State of Boston tells the story of how radical Bostonians, starting with David Walker in 1829, pushed for immediate abolition. But it also explains that many Bostonians’ fortunes were tied to the cotton economy. It’s certainly the case that Boston became a magnet for escaped slaves and free blacks. Abolition is a complicated, transatlantic thing which Boston played a significant part in, but Boston didn’t export abolitionism the way Virginia exported tobacco."

"Laurel, who taught at New Hampshire and then at Harvard, wrote this brilliant picture of rural New England life, set from the 1780s to the 1820 or so based on the diary of a midwife named Martha Ballard. It took virtuosic interpretive work to tease meaning out of the cryptic writings in this diary. She managed to assemble what coastal Maine was like in this time period. You get a stunning portrait of what it was like to live in that time and place. It’s a beautifully written book, a literary gem. It follows Martha through her life and each chapter moves around the calendar. The first chapter will be, say, September in one year and then the next one will be October of another year; on and on around the calendar. One of the things you imbibe by reading it is the way seasons shaped life. You learn the different chores, delights and diseases that came at different times of the year. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There’s a tendency to view the pastoral past as simple; A Midwife’s Tale also reveals the complexity and challenges of rural economic life. Not only is Martha Ballard a midwife, she’s also engaged in cloth production and food production. Her husband is a farmer who also runs timber mills. The book helps us appreciate the tremendous stock of knowledge that New Englanders, like the Ballards, had, and the complexity of their communities. So, anyone who is interested in books about New England ought to read A Midwife’s Tale . That’s complicated. The world that Ulrich wrote about is patriarchic. Males, by law and by custom, were heads of the household. Females, whether as wives or as daughters, were under the authority of husbands or fathers. Women weren’t able to vote or hold property in their names until far later. Yet, at the same time, the partnership that Martha had with her husband entailed codependence. Both husband and wife were engaged in the household-based economy. Domestic life in the northeast changed quite dramatically soon after the end of Ulrich’s story. Due largely to the growth of the New England textile industry, starting in the eighteen teens, we see a separation of women’s work and men’s work. The normative division becomes men work in offices, shops, and factories, while women’s work becomes confined to the home. That wasn’t true in the time of Martha Ballard. Even though she was living under a patriarchal legal and political structure, as a midwife, as a weaver, she was in engaged in the community. So, it’s an interesting question that you asked."

"The House of the Seven Gables is a deeply psychological novel set during the 1840s in Salem. It’s the story of the Pyncheons, an old New England family loosely modelled on Hawthorne’s own, and it’s a story of the place they build and occupy. The house itself is a character; a cursed character because the ancestor who built it essentially stole the land the house stands on by accusing the rightful owners of witchcraft. Like much of Hawthorne’s work, it’s a meditation on the way in which the past and the present intertwine in New England, and I believe it’s Hawthorne at his best. “It’s Hawthorne at his best” Hawthorne is at times wrongly characterized as stuck in New England’s colonial past. Although you’re right to say its focus is inward, it is also attuned to contemporary. Recall that one of the most important characters is a daguerreotypist, an expert in the new art of photography. And, in the most dramatic part of the plot, the railroad offers a way to essentially escape the past. So, Hawthorne mediates back and forth between his present and the past. You’re right; many people are tied to their past. But I try to demonstrate in The City-State of Boston that there is something about the compact size of New England and the centrality of so many places in it to the national narrative that makes New Englanders self-conscious about their past. The original sin part is important. In House of Seven Gables witchcraft persecution is the original sin. In a story called “Young Goodman Brown” Hawthorne confronts the extreme violence between New England Puritans and indigenous people head-on. Puritan colonists believed in the concept of original sin; that’s important to understanding New England and to New England’s understanding of its past."

"In Walden, Thoreau addresses himself to an imagined audience of New England readers. Walden can be seen as a meditation on the question of whether people in general, but New Englanders in particular, are awake and aware of their own experience. “ Walden is not about wilderness—it’s a commentary on New England at the height of its transformation by human hands” Thoreau can be thorny to read, but Walden is a tremendously important work in the history of environmental thinking and in the history of understanding our relationship with nature. There is a misconception that Walden is a paean to the natural world; it’s not. Thoreau is living in Concord, a town that has been colonized and farmed and altered by human beings for more than 200 years before he built his cabin. Although he lives in proximity to a pond, the railroad also ran nearby. Walden is not about wilderness—it’s a commentary on New England at the height of its transformation by human hands. On the one hand, of course the colonists were nonconformists; they were dissenters who would not conform to the dictates of The Church of England. On the other, partially because of the high levels of homogeneity in that colonization project, the Puritan founders of the New England colonies marginalized and even exiled outsiders. The way churches developed in the area is called “the New England way.” A culture that has a “way” is a culture that is expecting people to conform. So, there is tension between the nonconformist roots of New England and the calcification that set in when New England ways became custom. That is one of the things that Thoreau is trying to wake people up to. He had seen a lot of states, by 1871, and had just returned from his famed European tour. Compared to much of the rest of the United States, the civility of New England towns, the schools, the churches, and the aid societies, the structures of New England towns, the tidy town greens and their radiating roads, all of these things we’re done much better in New England. People think of Twain as a frontier writer, but he was often very disparaging of how things were done on the frontier. So, I’m guessing that assessment might have a lot to do with his preference for New England ways."