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Document generated on 06/17/2017 1:40 p.m. Urban History Review Urban History Review Cook, Edward M., Jr. The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in EighteenthCentury New England. The Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, Ninety-fourth Series, no. 2. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Pp. xviii, 273. Map, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $12.95 Craig Hanyon Volume 8, numéro 2, October 1979 21 92 See table of contents Publisher(s) Urban History Review / Revue d'histoire urbaine ISSN 0703-0428 (print) 1918-5138 (digital) 21 92 Explore this journal Cite this article Craig Hanyon "Cook, Edward M., Jr. The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England. The Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, Ninety-fourth Series, no. 2. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Pp. xviii, 273. Map, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $12.95." UrbanThis document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including All Rights Reserved © Urban History Review / Revue History Review 82 (1979): 123–124. reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. [ d'histoire urbaine, 1979 https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/] This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. www.erudit.org 123 with European as well as North-American history. Such a seminar might review the field issue by issue, concluding that "X" is understood now but "Y" is not. Then the group might prepare an agenda for research, proposing projects that would fill the gaps in our knowledge. Not only would this approach help us to learn more quickly and avoid redundancy; it would help social science in a far more valuable way. Instead of insulating them from their fellow social scientists, such a symposium would display quantitative historians to their best advantage, as having some particular and very useful skills to offer. The rest of us, who are not quantitative historians, need to know about this. But the present book preaches to the already converted. Lome Tepperman Department of Sociology University of Toronto * * * Cook, Edward M., J r . The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England. The Johns Hopkins Studies in H i s t o r i c a l and P o l i t i c a l Science, Ninety-fourth S e r i e s , no. 2. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University P r e s s , 1976. Pp. x v i i i , 273. Map, t a b l e s , appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $12.95. Given the fine studies of individual New England towns which are already available, Professor Cook's Fathers of the Towns i s both a logical development and a significant contribution. I t i s a logical scholarly step because Cook has gone beyond the anatomy of a single town to compare the patterns of leadership in seventy*-four communities. I t i s significant because h i s research design, incorporating prosopographical methods and informed by central place theory, has enabled him to develop a convincing five-fold typology of towns. This typology i s defined by melding the r e s u l t s of a s e r i e s of indices. As Cook points out, in the four colonies of New England, "the town was a t e r r i t o r i a l unit rather than a d i s t i n c t l y urban area. 11 Reasoning that "property values would be highest in an urban area, and roughly proportional to the marketing of goods in r u r a l areas" (pp. 78-79), Cook constructs a "commercialization index": a town's share of the colony's taxes divided by the area of the town. Two other indices measure the proportion of taxes paid by the wealthiest ten per cent and the proportion of prominent individuals in the town's population. Those individuals—members of famous families, college graduates, men who entered offices above the town level—reflected the "great t r a d i t i o n " as d i s t i n c t from the " l i t t l e t r a d i t i o n " i n t e r n a l to the towns. The l a t t e r was a milieu in which men progressed slowly to the office of selectmen, arriving there usually in t h e i r f o r t i e s , a f t e r t h e i r " a b i l i t y " had been thoroughly scrutinized by t h e i r fellow townsmen. The three 124 remaining indices focus upon the c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s of such town l e a d e r s , measuring the size of the leadership pool and the l e a d e r s ' tenure of office. The typology of towns which Cook d i s t i l l s from these measurements i s congruent with the basic tenets of central place theory. There was a hierarchy of towns. In major urban c e n t e r s , such as Boston and Providence, specialization in office-holding characterized developed p o l i t i c a l structures manned largely by "new" men. Next, there were major county towns. One or two families dominated the narrow e l i t e s of these local marketing and service centers. Power was l e s s concentrated in the third type of community, the secondary r u r a l c e n t e r s , and i t was quite diffuse in the "small, self-contained farming villages. 1 1 Cook finds t h i s type "characterized by a consistently e g a l i t a r i a n social order" (p. 179). Finally, there were frontier towns. Unformed and changing rapidly, these communities represented an early stage of the f i r s t four types rather than a truly d i s t i n c t category. The typology of towns i s central to Cook's study, but to that core he t i e s an exploration of the role of religion and of the influence of family. Membership in the Congregational Church was not a p r e r e q u i s i t e for leadership. Equally s i g n i f i c a n t , Cook observes t h a t , as there were types of towns, there were degrees of deference. This observation, and Cook's reference to the anthropological concepts of the great and l i t t l e t r a d i t i o n s , leads the reader to a n t i c i p a t e t h a t the f u l l range of New England's p o l i t i c a l culture w i l l unfold in The Fathers of the Towns, revealing, perhaps, v a r i e t i e s of paternalism. I t does not. Although Cook might have digested h i s massive data by means of multiple regressions and e t a c o r r e l a t i o n s , the weakness of h i s fine study i s not s t a t i s t i c a l . Rather i t l i e s in the book's failure to t e l l us if and how the colonists perceived t h e i r position in the hierarchy of town types, thereby refining the e g a l i t a r i a n and consensual model developed in Michael Zuckerman's Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1970). We have instead a convincing but pale and external chart of power linkages on the town, county and provincial l e v e l s . The chart i s nevertheless well wrought and demands t h a t h i s t o r i a n s add the color of human thought and feeling. Professor Craig Hanyon Department of History Brock University * * * Button, James W. Black Violence: Political Impact of the 1960s Riots. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Pp. xii, 179. Methodological appendices, index. $16.00