New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century by Virginia DeJohn Anderson

New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century by Virginia DeJohn Anderson

In New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century, Virginia DeJohn Anderson discusses the Great Migration and its impact on the formation of colonial New England history. In help to explain why early seventeenth-century Massachusetts developed  a society that was characterized by "town-based settlement,  the  predominance  of  freehold  family  farms,  comparative economic  equality,  and  a profoundly  religious  culture,” Anderson analyzes 693 immigrants who immigrated to North America from the Great Britain.

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she argues that  religious motives  provide  the best  explanation  of why  people joined  the  Great Migration,  she  reinforces her point by  showing  that  the  vast majority  of  immigrants  in  her sample had  achieved  such  a solid  middling  status  in  England  that  few could expect to improve themselves economically  by migrating to Massachusetts.

In New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century, Anderson argues that the traits of her group, their  communal  ideals  and  the  relative  absence  of  very  poor  or very  wealthy  individuals  in  their  ranks-contributed  in  fundamental  ways  to  sustaining  two  of  early  New  England's  most unique social features: the emergence  of a town-based  settlement pattern and the adoption of a relatively  egalitarian distribution of land.

Anderson also points  out that  the  new  society  was  not  identical  to  the  old. According to her, New  Englanders became  landowners  and  part-time  farmers and adjusted themselves to  the different  environment in colonial New England. Regarding to the legacy of the Great Migration, Anderson believes that it influenced  the  intellectual  climate  of  late  seventeenth-century  New  England and created a sharp generational  divide between those  New  Englanders who  had  come  to  the  New  World  in  the 1630s and the founders' children and grandchildren. 

Generally speaking, I think New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century is a good book. For those who are interested in immigration and its influences on colonial Americans, it is worth of reading.