Thanks to Jonathan Graehl, this summary of a 900-page book on the Colonial lifestyle. Albion’s Seed is not new but much of the information was new to me.
Do you love the city of Newark as much as Silicon Valley billionaires do? You’ll be pleased to know that the name comes from “New Ark Of The Covenant”
“The Puritans tried to import African slaves, but they all died of the cold.” (And we are still a lot whiter than other states.)
Massachusetts today may be the most lucrative jurisdiction in the world in which to get pregnant during a vacation, have an out-of-wedlock child, or to sell an abortion (see this chapter on Massachusetts family law and this chapter on out-of-wedlock child support; note that for plaintiffs suing defendants with income over $2 million, California and Wisconsin may be superior jurisdictions). Puritans, on the other hand, explicitly forbade the single parent lifestyle, whether done on a for-profit or not-for-profit basis: “Everyone was compelled by law to live in families. Town officials would search the town for single people and, if found, order them to join a family; if they refused, they were sent to jail.” and “98% of adult Puritan men were married, compared to only 73% of adult Englishmen in general.” Families were sizable: “The average family size in Waltham, Massachusetts in the 1730s was 9.7 children.” Results achieved included “Teenage pregnancy rates were the lowest in the Western world and in some areas literally zero.”
Massachusetts was unfriendly to startups: “In 1639, Massachusetts declared a ‘Day Of Humiliation’ to condemn ‘novelties, oppression, atheism, excesse, superfluity, idleness, contempt of authority, and trouble in other parts to be remembered'”
We were not the anti-gun bastion that we are today: “Everyone would stand there [in church] with their guns (they were legally required to bring guns, in case Indians attacked during the sermon) and hear about how they were going to Hell, all while the giant staring eye looked at them.”
Despite our lack of racial diversity, today we are one of the most financially unequal states (“Why Have Democrats Failed in the State Where They’re Most Likely to Succeed? Massachusetts should be a model state for liberal public policy, but instead it is one of the country’s most unequal.”). In Puritan times, by contrast, “the top 10% of wealthholders [in Massachusetts] held only 20%-30% of taxable property.”
Don’t like our culinary contributions to the world, such as Dunkin’ Donuts? In Puritan times food was “meat and vegetables submerged in plain water and boiled relentlessly without seasonings of any kind.”
Given their feelings about novelties and superfluity, the Puritans would likely not have loved Burning Man.
Along with the famous scarlet A for adultery, Puritans could be forced to wear a B for blasphemy, C for counterfeiting, D for drunkenness, and so on.
Sounds like twenty-five more classic novels just waiting to be written!
It might be interesting to trace through how, and how quickly, these social rules eroded. When, for example, was seasoning allowed on meat?, and what happened that made it permissible?
The reference to the New England boiled dinner as being cooked in plain water without seasoning of any kind is quite deceptive. The meat in a boiled dinner is almost always some sort of corned (salted) or smoked meat (because they had no other way of preserving meat) so even starting with plain water the problem is usually that you end up with too much salt rather than too little. Otherwise, it’s true, that they were not big on other spices. They might have put in some peppercorns if they could afford it, but it was quite expensive. They might have also served the boiled dinner with mustard or horseradish, which they were able to grow. The organic locavore cabbage, turnips, beets, carrots and parsnips (and meat) were full of flavor and would go for high $ at the local Whole Foods and didn’t really need a lot of spices. I’m sure that at some hipster place today you could easily put them on the menu for $28/serving, lack of spices notwithstanding.