The Cultural Life of the American Colonies [antikvár]

Editors^ Introduction T ^HE twentieth century has rediscovered the cultural life of the colonial period. The reconstruction of colonial Williamsburg, the skillful assemblage of such superb collections as those housed in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, and the innumerable restorations of the homes of planters and merchants, of village communities, and historic shrines are tangible evidence of a yearning to recapture the chaste simplicity of an earlier day. The popular enthusiasm for such enterprises attests the strong appeal to our own age of the tastes and style and goals of living of colonial times. To this rediscovery of our colonial past Dr. Wright's volume makes a significant and original contribution. His book is concerned not with traditional political history but with depicting how the colonists lived, the faiths and goals that inspired them, and the manner in which their lives were enriched. His lively and sympathetic story incorporates the results of the most recent scholarship but shows a nice discrimination in rejecting unproven assumptions. Dr. Wright is a man of strong convictions and he tears the veil off a number of myths about colonial culture. He strips Southern plantation life of a good deal of glamour, treats the New England Puritans with welcome objectivity, and provides many illuminating insights into the new aristocracy of trade. The society which Dr. Wright examines is refreshing in its diversity and astonishing for the amount of social mobility that it encouraged. There wiis a mercantile and a metropolitan way of life, a Chesapeake society, a Carolina society, and a back-country society. The peasant viii