The Minutemen and their World

Robert A. Gross. The Minutemen and their World. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976, 2001.

This "25th anniversary" reprint of a classic of social history adds a forward by Alan Taylor and a new afterword by the author; both of which put the book into the context of the time (as a then-novel melding of the quantitative methodologies of the "new social history" with more a narrative-based approach than most other practitioners were considering) as well as giving Gross an opportunity to tell the story of how the book came to be.

The book itself is short, readable, and relatively straightforward. In brief, Gross portrays Concord as a place which was deeply local in outlook until very close to the outbreak of the war; the locals were little involved or interested in the world beyond their borders (although in the Afterword, Gross concedes that subsequently he has learned that he probably exaggerated the level of isolation in the community), and deeply committed to traditional, hierarchical social norms. In fact, he argues that their involvement in the Revolution--once the movement for liberty came to Concord--was motivated by an effort to defend tradition as they understood it.

However, there were two reasons why that didn't work. First-the world as they knew it was already changing, and in fact he does a great job illustrating the demographic and economic pressures which were behind the deep anxiety the community was marked by at the time. Secondly, the logic of the Revolution itself created new dynamics which would allow--or even force--many locals to look forward to new opportunities rather than backward to an idealized past.

The republican unity which Concord sought to defend was an organic whole in which the 'individual' was expected to defer his or her own interests and even opinions to local society as a whole. And it was a unity which was proudly local in outlook. Yet the Revolution produced a world in which the individual would increasingly reign supreme, and the community would be more deeply engaged in--and its interests dictated by--the outside world than ever before.

The triumph of this book is that Gross rescued the Minutemen from the gauzy haze of patriotic myth. He restores them to their own complex world and their own complicated lives.