An award-winning study of Puritans and the formation of their towns.Preface
Introduction
The Web of Open-field life
Land, Hunger, Borough Rights, and the Power to Tax
The Secrets of the Corporation of This Town of Sudbury
“It Is Ordered by the Court”
Watertown on the Charles
“It Is Ordered and Agreed by This Town”
“All Civil Liberties As Other Towns Have”
“ We Shall Be Judged by Men of Our Own Choosing”
“Interest in This Town of Marlborough”
The Origin and Stability of a New England Town
Notes
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
“A meticulous and remarkably detailed account of the early government and social organization of the town of Sudbury, Massachusetts . . . The people and the events can be absorbing” —Time
“Puritan Village is a model study of its kind.”—Malcolm Freiberg,The American Historical Review
SUMNER CHILTON POWELL is a 1946 graduate of Amherst and received a doctorate from Harvard ten years later. A teacher of history on the secondary level (Choate, Bernard School for Boys), he has done much experimental work in tape teaching. This book – his third, but his first for an adult audience – was the culmination of ten years’ detective work among local records, archives, and private collections I the U.S. and England. It received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1964.