46 pages • 1 hour read
Robert A. GrossThe Minutemen and Their World
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Preface-PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
Robert Gross identifies his book as an example of the “new social history.” This reflects a focus on social trends and other developments that are often overlooked in history books that focus on the lives and actions of the most prominent members of society. As Gross explains, it also means that he had to use methods that allowed him to access information about the lives of people who may not have left any record of their lives. To understand the everyday lives of the citizens of Concord, Gross accessed numerous types of vital records, then applied methods of statistical analysis with the help of a computer—difficult work today that would have been much more so in the mid-1970s, when Gross was conducting his research.
Prologue Summary: “Winter Soldiers and Springtime Revolutionaries”
The book’s prologue opens in early 1775, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, when “[the] light snows of January and February scarcely muffled the sounds of Minutemen at drill.” (3) From this vantage point, the narrative takes a look backward at the century-and-a-half of history that had already passed since the town was founded in 1635. The opening sentence also reflects the Prologue’s focus on environmental and geographic elements of the Concord area as a force that shaped its history. The town was founded in an area with abundant natural resources: fish from the river, pine forests full of game, and natural meadows all attracted the original settlers, though by the time of the Revolution, many of these resources had been depleted.
The landscape is also credited with shaping regional political and economic life. Though the town was connected to Boston, Cambridge, Charleston, and other major settlements by two major roads and a ferry over the Charles River, the twenty-mile journey was over often-difficult terrain. As the following chapters of the book explain, the difficulty of travel within the town borders of Concord as well as the surrounding area would be a determining factor in both local politics and the course of the Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, a wide range of goods were available from merchants and producers in and around the town, and Concord’s roads were an asset, by the standards of the period: “Good roads were thus a valuable resource. Without them, Concord would have been just another country town” (7).
Finally, the changing seasons and the demands they made on a largely-agrarian society are cited as a determining factor in social life: births, marriages and deaths all fluctuated regularly with major religious holidays and the seasonal demands of running a farm. Politics, too, was seasonal: town meetings took place every year in March, and cases were heard by the county court in September, just before the harvest began. But, by 1775, these rhythms were changing: “The courts were closed: angry mobs, protesting judicial changes imposed by Parliament, refused to let them meet. Town politics became a year-round affair, with meetings throughout the winter to prepare for the expected assault by Redcoats” (9).
Preface-Prologue Analysis
The preface and prologue of the book set the stage for the rest of the story of Concord. The following chapters will explore the town’s history before the Revolution in detail. In contrast, these pages offer a snapshot of Concord life just before it became the site of the opening battle of the war.
Writing history usually involves analyzing the motivations of individuals; in the case of social history, the motivations of entire groups are analyzed at once, a very different task. Through the discussion of the seasons’ effects on the population of Concord, the author begins to construct a theory of human behavior, one where the need to ensure physical sustenance was a more powerful force in creating and sustaining a community than the formal processes of politics. Though not exactly a natural phenomenon, the focus on Concord’s good roads as a precondition for its economic prosperity emphasizes the importance of infrastructure as another element of the environment with a huge impact on the lives of the people living in the area.
The author’s focus on the integration of social rhythms with the patterns of the natural world creates the sense that though Concord would soon find itself at the center of a conflict with global consequences, that conflict originated elsewhere, and life in Concord before the Revolution was basically harmonious. This focus also emphasizes the degree to which the Revolution was a rupture that affected society at the most basic levels. Later chapters will examine how human communities changed the natural environment, and how these changes in turn affected economic development, public health, and familial relationships. Though it is not always the main topic of discussion, it is important to keep in mind the importance of environmental factors in understanding the book’s argument.
Concord is presented both as itself and as a representative of other New England towns of the period with similar social and economic structures. In the next chapters, we will see how social factors already present in the town would shift in response to events that would create the conditions for the Revolutionary War.
