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CHRIS ROJEK

Culturel
Studies
W 4^' !.€

S H O R T I N T R O D U C T I O N S
Cultural Studies
Polity Short Introduction series

Published

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Michael Bury, Health and Illness
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Cultural Studies

Chris Rojek

polity
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For George and Sue Ritzer, benign hosts of the ‘McDonald’s House’ in
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 Contents

Culture Counts 1
The local and the global 2
Media genre and cultural representation 4
The meaning of culture 5
The culture of 'friendly fire' 7

Doing Cultural Studies 10

Doing Cultural Studies 1: The case of Reality TV 12
Doing Cultural Studies 2: The internet 18
Doing Cultural Studies 3: The mobile phone 21
Multiple modernities 22

Culture is Structured Like aLanguage 24

The imaginary 25
The 3 D's 27

Zeroing in on Culture 29
The origins of Cultural Studies 30
Postwar Cultural Studies 33
Culture is ordinary 37

The Four 'M om ents' in CulturalStudies 39

National-Popular (1956-84) 40
V III CONTENTS

Textual-Representational (1958-95) 48
Globalization/Post-Essentialism (1 9 8 0 -) 55
Governmentality/Policy (1 9 8 5 -) 61
Cultural Studies at the crossroads 66

6 Situating Yourself in Culture 69

Location 70
Embodiment 76
Emplacement 85
Context 92
M odernity and postm odernity 97

7 Cultural Distortion 101

Cultural representation, ideology and hegemony 103
Ideology 104
Cultures are not monolithic 105
Mechanical reproduction and aesthetic culture 106
Imaginary illusion and symbolic fiction 108
Lara Croft/cyborg culture 110

8 Neat Capitalism 115

The emergence of neat capitalism 119
The meaning of neat capitalism 122
Generation X and Y 126
The Body Shop 127
Apple 129
Neat capitalism; the basics 131

9 Neat Publishing 135

Cultural Studies and the anti-establishment 138
The Urbana-Champaign conferences 141
Routledge 143

10 Conclusion: The 'Long March' of the Cultural

Imaginary 151
The market solution 153
 CONTENTS IX

The state solution 154

Another culture 157

Notes 162
References 163
A uthor Index 169
Subject Index 171
 Culture Counts

Every human culture produces general narratives, some based upon

common experience, others upon the selective experience of an elite or
ruling class, expressed as binding and sometimes sacred truths, designed
to achieve solidarity and a shared sense of the past. For every human
society consists of individuals and groups positioned in relations of
unequal access to scarce economic, political, social and cultural resources.
Because of this, those who acquire dominance have developed alliances
and traditions designed to legitimate rule and, upon this basis, have
participated in threading together a web of common rights, justice, truth,
ideals, myths and traditions to protect and advance their interests. Like
all groups they are unable to fully control the consequences of their
actions, even though they typically behave in public as if the opposite is
the case. Strategies and designs that have been planned to enhance their
position often have unintended consequences that return to haunt them
in the course of time.
Since dominant groups are in relations of privilege over other groups,
it follows that their position is directly and indirectly subject to challenge
and contest. Groups that challenge authority develop their own cultures
of resistance and opposition. These are modified through interplay with
dominant groups. Through this perpetual interchange and elaboration
culture grows.
The inevitable consequence of these cultural, social, economic and
political struggles is the assignment of credence to the necessarily partial
views of the powerful in respect of the shared past and the common
interest. Why? Sir John Harrington’s (1561-1612) oft-quoted bon mot
deserves repeating here:
2 CULTURE COUNTS

Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?

For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

In other words, the acquisition of cultural authority carries with it the

capacity to re-write history and redefine the nature of the present. But
cultural authority is seldom an open and shut case. Cultural interchange
produces unforeseen results and domination means that some groups are
disempowered and marginalized. However, domination and disempow-
erment are never absolute. Even the Muslim prisoners held by the Ameri­
cans at the Abu Ghraib camp, on what many expert international lawyers
regard to be dubious legal grounds, can protest and challenge authority.
One of the heartening lessons to be learned from doing Cultural Studies
is that dominant groups are not all-powerful. They are caught up in the
unintended, unanticipated consequences of intended cultural design like
everyone else. Of course, their capacity to influence these consequences
is typically greater than that of the average person or group. Nonetheless,
they are subject to limitations and constraints especially if their behav­
iour incites public censure or provokes condemnation.

The local and the global

In emphasizing the global reach of contemporary culture it is important

to not get carried away. Culture is always local as well as global.
National and global culture often rub against the conditions of life that
people experience, as it were, ‘on the ground’, in their own local spaces
and traditions. Resistance and opposition are the accessories of cultural
authority, for groups are always positioned differently in relation to
scarce resources and therefore develop various, contrasting traditions of
rights, justice and truth. For this reason they build many types of cultural
solidarity and conflicting ways of reading the past, and engage in fric­
tional ways of interpreting the world.
When it was made public that three of the suicide bombers who
attacked London in 2005 were British and the fourth was Anglo-
Jamaican, it triggered a fusillade of national and international debate.
Why would British Muslims want to murder and maim their own coun­
trymen? The answer, of course, is that the four men identified with a
form of radical Islam that made their nationality, where they lived, their
neighbours and their fellow workers, beside the point. The Arab satellite
broadcasting company A1 Jazeera TV aired a video ‘suicide note’ by the
alleged ringleader of the bombers, Mohammad Sadique Khan. Speaking
 CULTURE COUNTS 3

in a strong Yorkshire accent, the 30-year-old, former teaching assistant,

proactively justified the London bombs by referring to unparticularized
‘crimes against humanity’ perpetrated by Western governments in the
Arab region and the huge wealth of the West in comparison with the
relative poverty of the developing world. In attacking Londoners, Khan
and his fellow suicide bombers saw themselves as striking a blow against
Anglo-American imperialism in Iraq and Palestine. Their self-image was
of righteous religious warriors avenging the oppressed and marginalized
thousands of miles away in the Arabian subcontinent. Yet the constitu­
ency of Islamic people that supported the London suicide bombs is
dubious. Islamic leaders in Britain and other countries quoted from
passages in the Koran to condemn the bombers as criminals rather than
religious warriors.
The number of British Muslims who support the indiscriminate killing
of fellow civilians as a legitimate response to Anglo-American involve­
ment in the post-Saddam reconstruction of Iraq is infinitesimal. Why
then did Khan and his conspirators believe they were acting for either a
larger body of opinion or a greater good, which they hoped to render
manifest by dint of the explosives they triggered on three London under­
ground trains and a bus.^ What makes individuals and groups raised and
nurtured by a host national culture define themselves in diametric oppo­
sition to the values of that culture so that they are prepared to obliterate
themselves and others who have done no wrong against them and who
may, for all they know, share the outlook that they hold and aim to
promulgate?
Similar questions were raised earlier in the USA in the trials of the
Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols and the
Unabomber, Ted Kacynski. McVeigh had served with the American
military in the Gulf War; Kacynski was a former assistant Professor of
Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. Both saw them­
selves as American patriots and rejected the US government for, in their
view, having hoodwinked and betrayed the people. They seized on the
American doctrines of individualism and freedom of conscience to justify
kilhng and injuring fellow citizens. In McVeigh’s case, the main motiva­
tion was state spin, and the repression of the right to free speech for
right-wing groups. Kacynski operated with a more complex set of moti­
vations set out in his notorious 35,000-word U nabom ber M anifesto
pubhshed in 1995 in the N ew York Times and the Washington Post.
Here, in measured and rather compelling tones that would have not
disgraced many legitimate, established critics of contemporary culture,
Kacynski set out a condemnation of industrial civilization that centres
4 CULTURE COUNTS

upon its role in destroying the environment, fine-tuning conformity,

spreading misinformation, expanding surveillance powers, producing
ubiquitous sex and violence on television and assigning too much auton­
omy to multinational corporations.

Media genre and cultural representation

Our knowledge of these figures and the events associated with them is
transmitted to us through the media. The media isn’t just an impartial
relayer of news and information. It is a complex multi-corporate/state
network that codes and packages data for public consumption. Different
media organizations such as the BBC, CNN, Fox News, A1 Jazeera TV,
ABC, CBS, The Guardian, the N ew York Times, L e M onde, the Toronto
G lobe & Mail, the L os Angeles Times, the L ondon Evening Standard,
the N ew York Post and The Australian have distinctive styles of report­
ing and addressing audiences. Media genre is not just a question of
presentational style, it also includes questions of relevance, judgements
about the national and international significance of items and the cultural
and political agenda that informs these processes of selection. These
reflect not only national characteristics but also distinctive cultural tradi­
tions of journalism and broadcasting. To this extent, the news, just like
the companies that package and code it for us, is branded.
Among the best rationales for doing Cultural Studies is that it shows
why the human world is very often not what it seems to be and offers a
disciplined way of exposing how communication and representation
serve the interests behind power and manipulation. The common rights,
traditions and truths at our disposal often turn out to be illusions disguis­
ing powerful social interests and complex political devices designed to
achieve comphance. By critically examining them, we discover an intri­
cately staged version of our pooled traditions of truth and justice, and
what frequently turns out to be a mythical version of our shared past.
The metaphor of staging suggests that there is someone or something
behind the deception who wilfully engages in the craft of concealment
and fabrication. To be sure, there can be no doubt that the powerful
engage in systematic distortion to disguise the full range of their might
and the inner nature of their social, political and economic interests. It
would be rash and perverse to discount the formidable nature of their
power. Yet if it is right to describe them as puppeteers, history has a
habit of tying them up in their own strings. The interplay of culture
creates unplanned outcomes that condition the options for intentional
action for all.
 CULTURE COUNTS 5

Myth has certainly been used by the mighty to manipulate and control
ordinary people. But myths have also been developed by ordinary people
to give meaning to complex and bewildering events.
The 9/11 atrocity was so shocking and incompatible with the basic
tenets of Islam that some Muslims responded with the submission that
the CIA had concocted the attacks to throw Islam into disarray. The
devastating tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands in South East Asia
in December 2004 was explained by some conservatives as the punish­
ment of God for human waywardness. Myths have cultural origins and
they are typically elaborated in culture wars.
There are many ways in which this can be investigated in Cultural
Studies. We don’t need to start with abstract concepts like ‘ideology’,
‘hegemony’ or ‘interpellation’ to describe how cultural authority is
imposed; or ‘hybridity’, ‘encoding’ or ‘decoding’ to investigate how cul­
tural authority is contested. As we will see later, these concepts have
their place in the subject. But the root and branch of culture is about
how you and others around you are organized as persons. It is about
why one person believes that free university education is good, and
another insists that students must pay their way; or why Muslims gener­
ally tolerate arranged marriages, while Westerners typically deplore
them. Culture is about brass tacks. It influences our choice of friends,
sexual partners, diet, jobs, leisure activities and many other issues besides.
It explains much about how we live and how we die. Because we experi­
ence culture as individuals it is easy to imagine that our private world is
unique. But culture is public. It is the system of representation through
which we render ourselves unto ourselves and others, as ‘individuals’,
‘unique persons’ and ‘social agents’. By studying it we gain knowledge
of how even the most private experience is culturally enmeshed.

The meaning of culture

The term ‘culture’ derives from the Latin cultura. The original meaning
was agricultural, referring to the practice of tilling the soil, growing crops
and raising animals. Understandably, Cultural Studies has paid scant
attention to this obsolete meaning. Instead, it proceeds on the basis that
the term ‘culture’ today carries dual social meanings having to do with
urban-industrial forms of knowledge and power. Knowledge here is
understood as both concrete ideas about the meaning of culture and
technical ideas about how to communicate meanings to best effect.
Power refers to the unequal distribution of economic, cultural and politi­
cal resources in society, and the changing balance of influence and force
6 CULTURE COUNTS

attached to this state of affairs. Cuhural Studies insists upon conceptual­

izing culture as the intersection of force and resistance. There are many
shared ingredients of popular reality. But much of it is struggled over,
contested and opposed.
The first of the twin meanings in common currency today is evalua­
tive. It refers to culture as the cultivation of mind, taste, manners, artistic
accomplishments and the scientific and intellectual attainments of a
particular people. This meaning is hierarchical since it portrays culture
as the summit of achievement among a body of people. Of course, culture
is something that a social stratum, typically conceptualized as an elite,
or ruling class possesses. The non-elite, usually identified as the mass or
‘the people’, are acknowledged to create cultures of their own. But they
are generally assumed to be inferior, or secondary.
The second meaning is narrative. It refers to the bundle of beliefs,
myths, customs, practices, quirks and the general way of life that is
characteristic of a specific population. This is a descriptive approach to
culture that recounts the ordinary features of life that predominate
among a people. Anthropologists, historians and sociologists have had
the lion’s share in elaborating our understanding of the narrative content
and patterns of culture. But the contribution of Cultural Studies is
increasingly significant, especially through the use of how representation
frames popular reality and the multiple realities of culture revealed
through ethnography and other forms of qualitative research.
Expressed concisely. Cultural Studies has spent much of its history
dismantling the first meaning of culture while simultaneously elucidating
the role of knowledge and power in influencing the second. This sounds
hke a dry business. Yet, ironically, the birth of Cultural Studies was
attended by considerable notoriety. Why was this.^ Above all else, treat­
ing popular culture seriously impacted against the condescension of elite
groups, for the most rarefied of whom, the masses were held to be more
or less incapable of generating worthwhile cultural content or form. To
declare value in forms of resistance in schoohng, to study comics and
cartoon characters as signs of knowledge and power, or to treat media
panics over mugging as a barometrical reading of the crisis in the state
was akin to hurling a mixture of salt and pepper in the face of the estab­
lishment. Even those in the turreted elite of a more liberal ilk bridled at
the application of the term ‘culture’ to describe classroom trouble­
makers, adolescent female consumers of comics and, above all, convicted
young criminals. From their point of view these elements were the antith­
esis of culture, because they posed a threat to the peace of society. What
was needed for them was not understanding or tolerance but a hard.
 CULTURE COUNTS 7

no-nonsense policy consisting of clear rules of behaviour and zero

tolerance.
Notions of ‘peace’ and ‘common sense’ were of course viewed through
elite spectacles, but they were assumed to be universal and self-evident.
In arguing that elite values distorted and manipulated culture, Cultural
Studies was held in some quarters to be an activity bordering on
subversion.
But Cultural Studies actually went further than this. It submitted that
the content and form of culture is moulded by knowledge and power
and is the means not only of controlling and manipulating people, but
also for resisting inequality and domination. By relating questions of
culture to matters of political control and social leadership. Cultural
Studies therefore questioned the prevailing balance of power in society.
More particularly, the authority of elite groups and the relevance of their
characteristic knowledge and power were taken to task. The practice of
Cultural Studies made every received cultural tradition, set of assump­
tions and official explanation of social and cultural reality up for grabs.
Nothing could be treated as sacred or beyond discussion any more.
Indeed, one of the most powerful consequences of Cultural Studies is
that this emphasis upon demystification and deconstruction made every­
thing a legitimate subject for study. Traditional ideas that some cultural
issues were too ‘trivial’ to study were redefined by students of Cultural
Studies as a cause célèbre.

The culture of 'friendly fire'

Consider the case of Corporal Patrick D. Tillman, a member of the US

Army Rangers, who at 27 was killed in an Afghan ravine in April 2004
(see figure 1.1). After his death, Patrick was celebrated in the media as
an all-American hero. He enlisted following the 9/11 attacks, after
turning his back on a lucrative career as a defensive back in the American
National Football League. He was motivated by the example of his
grandfather who served at Pearl Harbor, and a conviction that his
country was imperilled by foreign foes. But on many fronts, the truth
was more complicated.
Initially his death was described as the result of a ‘fire-fight’. It was
not until the publication of the official inquiry, a year later, that the full
facts emerged. Tillman had been killed by ‘friendly fire’ in an act of ‘gross
negligence’, in the words of a US army investigator. He was the victim
of a collapse in ‘situational awareness’ that resulted in two groups of
8 CULTURE COUNTS

Fig. 1.1. Patrick Tillman © AP/EMPICS

American soldiers mistaking one another for the enemy, and discharging
their weapons against each other.
Tillman is an interesting modern American hero. An atheist, an anti­
war activist and an ally of the prominent left-wing critic Noam Chomsky
- he was scheduled to meet Chomsky on his return from Afghanistan - he
nonetheless volunteered to go to war in a cause about which he enter­
tained grave doubts. Perhaps his involvement in the world of American
sports exploited and developed a sort of knee-jerk nationalism in his
personality. Tillman would not be the first or last intelligent young critic
 CULTURE COUNTS 9

of American foreign policy to decide that in the end he was for his
country, right or wrong.
For students of Cultural Studies a number of fascinating questions are
suggested by this incident. What culture of masculinity created Patrick
Tillman? Flow was his close identification with the culture of national
interests engineered? In what ways did he handle his reservations about
the war during his time of service? How are ‘allies’ and ‘enemies’ cultur­
ally coded and recognized? What makes ‘situational awareness’ collapse?
Why did military officials seek to disguise the manner of his death? What
has the anti-war movement done to make an issue of the circ’umstances
of his death?
These questions belong to the sphere of cultural politics, and they are
legitimate, indeed one might say, necessary topics for Cultural Studies.
Why necessary? Because they reveal the public calculus behind ‘private’
choices, the complex intended and unintended forces that present a
truncated view of the past as binding and point to the motivations of
the cultural interests who try to tailor history to fit their own cloth. By
investigating these topics we have the chance of becoming better
acquainted with how meaning is presented and resisted in common
culture. In a word, we stand the chance of becoming better citizens.
Cultural Studies is frontally concerned with political issues. This is
inevitable because individuals and groups are positioned in a set of
unequal relationships with respect to scarce economic, social, cul­
tural and political resources. But there is more to the subject than a
political focus.
 Doing Cultural Studies

I submit that there are four interrelated components of Cultural Studies,

having to do with the observation of culture (genre), the manufacture of
culture (production), the exchange of culture (consumption) and the
contestation of culture (cultural politics). Let us examine them in more
detail.
1 Genre, or the patterning of cultural form and content. What types
of culture do people identify with recognition and belonging.^ How does
Goth culture represent itself? What devices do women’s magazines use
to attract readers? What are the characteristics of House and Techno
culture? How does American Pop Idol differ from its British equivalent?
In what ways do cultures of cuisine signify power and difference? What
do motor racing enthusiasts have in common? How do Chinese tourist
websites represent backpacker experience? How does Afro beat hip hop
differ from Afropean basement and pop? What are the main identifying
features of Eminem’s fan base? What are the characteristics of the gun
lobby in America? Questions of genre address the characteristics of cul­
tural form and content. They enable us to compare and contrast cultural
formations and construct cartographies of cultural difference.
2 Production has to do with the creation of cultural meaning and
the interests behind the presentation of cultural form and content. Why
are people like Patrick Tillman prepared to die for their country? In what
ways do multinationals apply branding to generate desire in consumer
culture? In what ways do the media fan popular consciousness of news
and culture? What cultural meanings are Vodafone, Adidas, Pepsi, Bryl-
creem. Police Sunglasses and Rage Computer and Video Games trying
 DOING CULTURAL STUDIES 11

to connect with consumers by employing David Beckham to endorse

their products? How has Apple Mac sought to use cultural references to
enlarge iPod market share? How do Manchester United or the Chicago
Bears recruit and unite fans? How does the state’s control of licensing
influence cultural behaviour? How do deviant subcultures emerge and
protect their privacy? The topic of production addresses the blueprint
and application of cultural meaning. It examines the means and ends
involved in traditions and projects of cultural reproduction.
3 Consumption refers to the various processes of how cultural mean­
ings are assimilated, by consumers. How are cultural texts exchanged?
What factors influence the assimilation of cultural meaning? What are
the cultural barriers that have to date prevented the e-book from taking
off in consumer culture? How is cultural form and content developed to
signify difference and opposition? What are the various cultural mean­
ings of sunglasses? How does tourist experience of Jamaica coincide with
and differ from the representations of travel brochures? What are the
cultural meanings of Beavis and Butthead or The Osbournes or The
Simpsons} How do audiences subvert cultures of authority? Questions
of reception focus upon the response of consumers to cultural commodi­
ties and meanings. They concentrate on the interface between cultural
production and exchange. They require us to consider the field of culture,
including the traditions and orientations that consumers bring to the
exchange process.
4 CulPol (Cultural politics) refers to how meaning is presented,
resisted and opposed through the process of cultural exchange. CulPol
confronts issues of values, difference, knowledge and power. How is
cultural form and content developed to signify difference and opposi­
tion? In what ways can brand culture be resisted? What should the
balance between access and excellence be in higher education? Why do
some human groups have greater influence over the media than others?
Upon what basis in 2005 did Larry Summers, the President of Harvard
University, claim that women possess a lower aptitude for engineering
and the natural sciences than men? What doctrinal objections did the
managers of Westminster Abbey have in mind in 2005 to refuse £100,000
for filming the Da Vinci C ode in the Abbey precincts? Why do many
traditional Americans oppose stem cell research? How has the anti­
smoking movement succeeded in decreasing levels of tolerance in the
West to smoking in public? In what ways do school subcultures challenge
the cultural order imposed by teachers? Cultural politics investigates how
we are differently situated in relation to scarce economic, social, political
and cultural resources and the struggles and alliances that arise from this.
12 DOING CULTURAL STUDIES

- Genre -

CulPol Production

' C onsum ption'

Fig. 2.1. Tiie sphere of Cultural Studies

It raises issues of cultural authority, distributive justice and

empowerment.
Cultural Studies then might be defined as the exploration of interre­
lationships between genre, production, consumption and cultural politics
(see figure 2.1).
Precisely because staged versions of history and the truth are intri­
cately constructed, revealing the forces that empower them is often
tricky. One good way of approaching these questions is by means of
comparative and historical analysis. Why? Two natural fallacies that
people often make in ordinary life are that their experience is universal
and that fundamental things have always been the same. By comparing
cultural, political and economic conditions in other societies with those
of our own (comparative analysis), and examining how people thought
and acted in other times (historical analysis), we stand the chance of
developing a perspective on what is common and what is unique. A
comparative-historical approach is one of the surest ways of avoiding
the errors of assuming that what is true of the locality which we inhabit
is true everywhere and that the fundamentals of life have always been
the same irrespective of society, culture and history. Moreover, it does
not require great technical expertise or ability to apply. Everyone can
imagine and readily research how conditions of culture vary between
countries and different historical times.

Doing Cultural Studies 1: the case of Reality TV

Although a comparative and historical perspective is a prerequisite, there

are several ways of doing Cultural Studies. The discipline is not like legal
studies, medicine or engineering in which a well-established tradition of
facts and positions must be interrogated, internalized and applied. On
the contrary, at the heart of Cultural Studies is the notion that facts are
 DOING CULTURAL STUDIES 13

not meaningful except in relation to other meanings. In other words, a

fact is not a thing but a representation. Its meaning derives from the
position it occupies in a field of communication. Moreover, these fields
are not inert. They change, often in rapid and unexpected ways. This
complicates the task of building a fixed, universal curriculum in Cultural
Studies.
Compared with traditional culture, modern culture is super-dynamic.
Genres come and go with tremendous speed. Take the example of Reality
TV. A decade ago Reality TV was unknown. Today programmes like
Big Brother, Survivor, The Osbournes and Celebrity C h ef have devel­
oped international followings. In the case of Ozzy Osbourne or a chef
such as Gordon Ramsay, their existing fame is magnified and reposi­
tioned. More interestingly, people plucked from the rank-and-file are
elevated, however temporarily, into stardom. The suspension of the
hierarchy between celebrity ascendance and the audience exposes ques­
tions about the nature of fame and the ‘docility’ of consumers. Reality
TV operates by staging improbable combinations of people in confined
situations and recording the results. What happens when you invite
someone to marry a millionaire on live TV? How do you respond as an
adopted child when you are faced by a bunch of men you have never
met before, one of whom is purported to be your natural father? What
happens when you mix an aggressive personality with passive ones in a
house share? Such television is enormously attractive to TV broadcasting
companies because it is cheap to produce yet has the capacity to generate
mass audiences in the ratings wars.
Most of us think that Reality TV is an entirely new genre. A compara­
tive and historical approach corrects this misconception. An interest in
using television to illuminate the rules of everyday life and educate the
public has been a long-standing feature of public broadcasting. In the
1960s, Candid Camera aired in the USA (fronted by Allen Funt) and a
cover version appeared in Britain (with Bob Monkhouse as presenter and
Jonathan Routh as lead prankster). The format was a Reality TV version
of everyday life disrupted by planned events organized by the producers
of the programmes. Funt and Routh inserted themselves into routine life
situations with the intention of overturning them. By breaking down the
conventions of behaviour in settings like shops, bus queues or highway
traffic, the presenters engineered exchanges in which the human condi­
tion was humorously, and often ironically, addressed. In the 1970s, a
cinéma vérité approach evolved in An American Family (directed by
Craig Gilbert, 1973) and the British version. The Family (directed by
Paul Watson, 1974). These programmes were produced as fly-on-the-
14 DOING CULTURAL STUDIES

wall documentaries about life in a ‘typical’ family, filmed over several

months, with disclosures edited to tell a story, often with a clear moral
message attached to each broadcast episode.
Today satellite broadcasting allows for a more varied and intense diet
of Reality TV because it permits sustained, live, unedited broadcasting.
This changes how we position ourselves in relation to broadcast data.
Two aspects to this point must be differentiated.
Firstly, because satellite transmission theoretically permits continuous
live broadcasts, it alters the rules of the genre of Reality TV. Shows like
An American Family and The Family were edited and produced as docu­
mentaries designed to have a pedagogic effect. By living with the Wilkins
family in the BBC’s series The Family, viewers were invited to make
practical, moral and strategic judgements about the behaviour displayed
on-screen and, by implication, to apply this to their own lives.
Conversely, today’s Reality TV operates in what John Corner (2002)
argues is a post-docum entary genre. That is, Reality TV presents ‘a slice
of life’ and is non-judgemental. Of course, the people who are being
filmed make judgements about each other’s behaviour. So do the audi­
ence watching at home. But these judgements are not part of the planned
production values of the programme. Yet Reality TV is not like ‘real’
life. This applies both on-screen and for the consumer. The players may
grow accustomed to the cameras but they are also aware of inhabiting
a goldfish bowl watched by millions; and the audience is conscious that
players are projecting behavioural traits and opinions to affect the voting
powers of the TV audience. The fact that judgements about the difference
between reality and illusion are constantly made in shows like Big
Brother and I ’m A Celebrity Get Me Out O f H ere raises the question
of the nature of Reality TV as a cultural genre. This brings me to my
second point.
To propose that Sharon Osbourne in The Osbournes or Johnny
Rotten and Peter Andre in Vm A C elebrity. . . Get Me Out O f Here,
Abi Titmuss in Celebrity L ove Island, or, for that matter, a participant
in Big Brother are acting ‘normally’ or ‘naturally’ on-screen is central to
the conventions of the broadcast, but a moment’s thought renders it
implausible. However ‘comfortable’ they may feel in front of the camera,
and regardless of the length of time that they are followed by its lens,
they are still conscious of performing ‘on-screen’ in order to achieve an
effect in the viewers watching at home. This dictates the pattern of
behaviour that viewers see. A greeting between two people on a city
street carries a different ‘note’ than a meeting between two who know
that they are being filmed for global television. If this is the case, it raises
 Another Random Document on
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treat with greater respect those of Holland; and indeed they had the
countenance of the home government in encroachments upon the
Dutch colonies. In 1642 Boswell, who represented England at the
Hague, advised his fellow-countrymen in New England to "put
forward their plantations and crowd on, crowding the Dutch out of
those places where they have occupied."
The New Englanders were not slow to adopt this aggressive policy.
Settlements were pushed out westward from New Haven on the
mainland, and southward on Long Island. Peter Stuyvesant, then
governor of New Netherland, bitterly complained of these
encroachments,—for the Dutch then claimed everything between the
Connecticut and Delaware rivers,—and appealed to the federal
commissioners to put a stop to them; but the answer came that the
Dutch were selling arms and ammunition to the Indians, that their
conduct was not conducive to peace, that they harbored criminals
from the English colonies, and that the United Colonies proposed to
"vindicate the English rights by all suitable and just means."
Stuyvesant, who was a hot-headed man, would have liked to go to
war with the New Englanders, but was informed by the Dutch West
India Company that war "cannot in any event be to our advantage:
the New England people are too powerful for us." The matter was
finally (1651) left to arbitrators, who settled a provisional boundary
line which "on the mainland was not to come within ten miles of the
Hudson River," and which gave to Connecticut the greater part of
Long Island.
Weakness of War broke out between England and Holland in 1652,
the and the Connecticut people were anxious to attack New
confederation
in the DutchNetherland, which had not ceased its depredations on
War. the outlying settlements. All of the federal
commissioners except those from Massachusetts voted
to go to war; there was a stormy session of the federal court, in
which Massachusetts endeavored in vain to override the other
colonies. Connecticut and New Haven applied to Cromwell for
assistance. He sent over a fleet to Boston, with injunctions to
Massachusetts to cease her opposition. The General Court stoutly
refused to raise troops for the enterprise, although it gave to the
agents of Cromwell the privilege of enlisting five hundred volunteers
in the colony if they could. But while arrangements were in progress
for an attack by eight hundred men on New Amsterdam, news came
that England and Holland had proclaimed peace (April 5, 1654), and
warlike preparations in America ceased.
The weakness of the New England confederation was
Massachusetts
in collisionevident in domestic affairs as well as in foreign wars.
with the
Massachusetts was frequently in collision with the
commissioners
. commissioners. An instance occurred as early as 1642-
1643, when trouble broke out with the Narragansetts,
who were friends and allies of the disturber Gorton at Shawomet.
Massachusetts refused to sanction hostilities; nevertheless the
commissioners despatched a federal force against the Indians; but
the expedition proved futile, owing to lack of support from the chief
colony.
Contention Saybrook, at the mouth of the Connecticut River, was
between purchased by the Connecticut federation in 1644. In
Connecticut
and order to compensate herself, Connecticut levied toll on
Massachusetts every vessel passing up the river. Massachusetts owned
. the valley town of Springfield, and entered complaint
before the commissioners (1647) that Connecticut had no right to
tax Massachusetts vessels trading with a Massachusetts town. Two
years later (1649) the commissioners decided in favor of
Connecticut; whereupon Massachusetts levied both export and
import duties at Boston designed to hamper the trade of her sister
colonies; at the same time she demanded that because of her
greater size she be allowed three commissioners, and insisted that
the power of the federal body be reduced. This action created great
hostility, and threatened at one time to break up the union. By 1654
the contention had been allowed to drop on both sides, and duties
on intercolonial trade ceased.
 68. Repression of the Quakers (1656-1660).
Treatment of During the remainder of the Commonwealth period the
the Quakers. most serious question which arose in New England was
what to do with the Quakers. In the theocracy of the seventeenth
century the attitude of the sect was both theologically and politically
well calculated to arouse hostility. They would strip all formalities
from religion, they would recognize no priestly class, they would not
take up arms in the common defence, would pay no tithes and take
no oath of allegiance, they doubted the efficacy of baptism, had no
veneration for the Sabbath, and had a large respect for the right of
individual judgment in spiritual matters. They were aggressive and
stubborn, and, goaded on by persecution, broke out into fantastic
displays of opposition to the State religion. In England four thousand
of them were in jail at one time. When Anne Austin and Mary Fisher
arrived in Boston (1656) from England, by way of the Barbados, as a
vanguard of the Quaker missionary army, the colonial authorities
were aghast with horror. The adventurous women were shipped
back to the Barbados, and a law was enacted against "all Quakers,
Ranters, and other notorious heretics," providing for their flogging
and imprisonment at hard labor. Despite this harsh treatment, the
Quakers continued to arrive. Roger Williams said, when applied to by
Massachusetts to harry them out of Rhode Island: where they are
"most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and only opposed
by arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to come....
They are likely to gain more followers by the conceit of their patient
sufferings than by consent to their pernicious sayings." Nevertheless,
Rhode Island was and is the stronghold of the Friends in New
England.
In 1657 it was enacted that Quakers who had once been sent away
and returned, should have their ears lopped off, and for the third
offence should have their tongues pierced with red-hot irons.
Banishment on pain of death was recommended by the federal
commissioners in 1658; and in 1659-1660 four Quakers lost their
lives by hanging on Boston Common. Public sentiment revolted at
these spectacles, and in 1660 the Massachusetts death-law was
repealed, and Quakers were thereafter subjected to nothing worse
than being flogged in the several towns; even this gradually ceased,
with the growth of a more humane spirit. In Connecticut the sect
suffered but little persecution, and in Rhode Island none; while
Plymouth and New Haven were nearly as harsh in their treatment as
Massachusetts.
New England The restoration of royalty in England (1660) began a
in the handsnew epoch in the history of the colonies. Their control
of the council
for the was placed in the hands of a council for the plantations,
plantations.and twelve privy councillors were designated to take
New England in charge. The Quakers had seized the
opportunity of gaining an early hearing from the new king, who was
charitably disposed towards them. In its address to Charles, the
Massachusetts court expatiated on the factious spirit of the Quakers;
but the king replied that while he meant well by the colonies, he
desired that hereafter the Quakers be sent to England for trial,—a
desire which was as a matter of course disregarded.

69. Royal Commission (1660-1664).

It is not surprising that the king was disposed to look with suspicion
upon the men of New England. He had been told that the
confederacy was "a war combination made by the four colonies
when they had a design to throw off their dependence on England,
The king and for that purpose." The New Englanders, too, had
suspects New been somewhat slow to proclaim his ascendancy; while
England's
loyalty. two of the judges who had sentenced his father to
death, Goffe and Whalley, were screened from royal
justice by the people of New Haven, and afterwards by those of
Hadley, a Massachusetts town in the Connecticut valley.
Massachusetts had been bold enough when the home government
was so distracted by other affairs as to render attention to the
colonies impracticable; now that Charles appeared to be turning his
attention to America a more politic course was pursued. Simon
Bradstreet, a leading layman, and John Norton, prominent among
the ministers, were sent to England to make peace with the Crown,
and soon returned (1662) with a gracious answer, which, however,
was coupled with an order to the court to grant all "freeholders of
competent estate" the right of suffrage and office-holding, "without
reference to their opinion or profession," to allow the Church of
England to hold services, to administer justice in the name of the
king, and to compel all inhabitants to swear allegiance to him. The
court decreed that legal papers should thereafter run in the king's
name; but all other matters in the royal mandate were referred to a
committee which failed to report upon them.
Affairs now went on peacefully enough in Massachusetts
Arrival of royal
commissionersuntil 1664. In that year the king sent over four royal
.
commissioners to look after the colonies, among them
being Samuel Maverick, one of the Presbyterian petitioners who had
made trouble for the New Englanders a few years before. These
commissioners were required "to dispose the people to an entire
submission and obedience to the king's government;" also to feel
the public pulse in Massachusetts, in order to see whether the Crown
might not judiciously assume to appoint a governor for that colony.
They arrived at Boston in July with two ships-of-war and four
hundred troops. Obtaining help from Connecticut, the expedition
proceeded to New Amsterdam and easily conquered that port from
the Dutch. During the months the commissioners were at Boston
they were engaged in a prolonged quarrel with the Massachusetts
men, who claimed that their charter allowed them to govern
themselves after their own fashion, without interference from a royal
commission. The court was persistently importuned to give a plain
answer to the king's demands sent out in 1662; but nothing
satisfactory could be obtained, and the commissioners were obliged
to return without having accomplished their mission. The Dutch war
against England was now going on, and political affairs at home
were unquiet. A policy of delay had been profitable for
Massachusetts.
Treatment of In the other colonies of New England better treatment
Connecticut, had been accorded the commissioners. Connecticut had
sent over her governor, the younger Winthrop, to represent her at
court. He was well received there, being a man of scholarly tastes
and pleasing manner; the king was the more disposed to favor him
because by helping Connecticut a rival to Massachusetts would be
built up. A liberal charter was granted to his colony; and New Haven
—disliked by Charles for having harbored the regicides—was now,
and of Rhode despite her protest, annexed to her sister colony. Rhode
Island. Island, too, was benefited by the royal favor, and
received a charter making it a separate colony. Doubtless the fact
that the people of Narragansett Bay had been shut out from the
New England confederacy had inclined the king to look kindly upon
them. For these reasons Connecticut and Rhode Island had received
the commissioners with consideration, while weak Plymouth was also
praised for her ready obedience.
Decadence ofThe suppression of New Haven by the king, and the
the practical victory of the Quakers over the theocratic policy
confederation.
of Massachusetts, were staggering blows to the
confederation. The federal commissioners held triennial meetings
thereafter until 1684, when the Massachusetts charter was revoked;
but its proceedings, except during King Philip's war, were of little
importance.
A prosperousThe period of the decadence of the confederation,
period. however, was in the main one of prosperity for New
England. Emigration to America had almost wholly ceased after
1640, with the rise of the Puritans in England; but the restoration of
the Stuarts and the passage of the Act of Uniformity, with its
accompanying persecutions, caused a renewal of the departure of
Dissenters, and the movement included many, both laymen and
clericals, of eminent ability. New industries were introduced,
commerce grew, the area of settlement extended, and wealth
increased.
Change of But the accretion of wealth and the passage of time
attitude brought changes in the attitude towards England that
towards
England. threatened in a measure to counteract the quiet struggle
for independence which had been going on for nearly
half a century. A second generation of Americans had come upon the
stage, with but a traditional knowledge of the tyrannies practised
upon their fathers in the old country. Larger wealth secured greater
leisure, which resulted in a cultivation of the graceful arts, with a
softening of the austere manners and thinking of the first emigrants.
There was now manifest a desire on the part of many members of
the upper class to bring about closer relations with the Old World,
with its fine manners, its aristocracy, and its historic associations.
Opposition to England began to give place to imitation of England;
colonial life had entered the provincial stage. Two parties had by this
time sprung up, although as yet without organization,—one desiring
to conciliate England, the other standing for independence in
everything except in name. Thus far none had ventured to think of
the possibility of dissolving all political connection with the mother-
land.

70. Indian Wars (1660-1678).

The Indian policy of the New Englanders was more
Indian policy
of New humane than that adopted in any of the other colonies
England.
except Pennsylvania. Compensation had been granted to
the savages for lands taken, firm friendships had been formed
between some of the chiefs and the whites, and the missionary
enterprises among the red-men were conducted on a large scale and
with much zeal. Martha's Vineyard, Cape Cod, and the country round
about Boston were the centres of proselytism; the "praying Indians"
were gathered into village congregations with native teachers, most
notable being those under the supervision of John Eliot, "the
apostle." Of these converted Indians there were in 1674 about four
thousand; several hundred of them were taught a written language
invented by Eliot, who successfully undertook the monumental labor
of translating the Bible into it for their benefit.
Troubles with Massasoit, head-chief of the Pokanokets, had made a
Philip. treaty of alliance with the Plymouth colonists soon after
their arrival, and kept it strictly until his death (1660). His two sons
were christened at Plymouth as Alexander and Philip. Alexander died
(1662) at Plymouth, where he had gone to answer to a charge of
plotting with the Narragansetts against the whites. Philip, now chief
sachem, wrongfully thinking his brother to have been poisoned, was
thereafter a bitter enemy of the dominant race. For twelve years
there were numerous complaints against him, and he was frequently
summoned to Plymouth to make answer. He was smooth-spoken and
fair of promise, but came to be regarded as an unsatisfactory person
with whom to deal. In 1674 it became evident that Philip was
planning a general Indian uprising, to drive the English out of the
land.
His territory was now chiefly confined to Mount Hope,—a
King Philip's
War. peninsula running into Narragansett Bay; and here he
"began to keep his men in arms about him, and to gather strangers
unto him, and to march about in arms towards the upper end of the
neck on which he lived, and near to the English houses." On the
twentieth of June a party of his warriors attacked the little town of
Swanzey, killing many settlers and perpetrating fiendish outrages.
War-parties from Mount Hope now quickly spread over the country,
joined by the Nipmucks and other tribes. Throughout the white
settlements panic prevailed, and several towns in Massachusetts, as
far west as the Connecticut valley, were scenes of heart-rending
tragedies.
The Narragansetts had played fast and loose in this struggle, their
disaffection growing with the success of the savage arms. It was
evident that unless crushed, they would openly espouse Philip's
cause in the coming spring, and the danger be doubled. A thousand
volunteers, enlisted by the federal commissioners, on December 19
attacked their palisaded fortress in what is now South Kingston. Two
thousand warriors, with many women and children, were gathered
within the walls. About one thousand Indians were slain in the
contest, which was one of the most desperate of its kind ever fought
in America.
The following spring and summer Philip again made bloody forays on
the settlements; but he was persistently attacked, his followers were
scattered, and he was at last driven, with a handful of followers, into
a swamp on Mount Hope. Here (Aug. 12, 1676) he was shot to
death by a friendly Indian, and "fell upon his face in the mud and
water, with his gun under him; ... upon which the whole army gave
three loud huzzas." His hands and head were cut off and taken to
Boston and Plymouth respectively, in token to the people at home
that King Philip's war was at an end, and that thereafter white men
were to be supreme in New England.
During the two years' deadly struggle the colonists had
The effect of
the struggle.
been surfeited with horrors, of which the statistics of
loss can convey but slight idea. Of the eighty or ninety towns in
Plymouth and Massachusetts, nearly two-thirds had been harried by
the savages,—ten or twelve wholly, and the others partially
destroyed; while nearly six hundred fighting men—about ten per
cent of the whole—had either lost their lives or had been taken
prisoners, never to return. It was many years before the heavy war-
debts of the colonies could be paid; in Plymouth the debt exceeded
in amount the value of all the personal property.
The year before Philip fell (1675), trouble broke out with the Indians
to the north, on the Piscataqua. In the summer of 1678 the English
of Maine felt themselves compelled to purchase peace, thus
establishing a precedent which fortunately has not often been
followed in America. The home government was much annoyed at
the obstinacy of the colonists in not calling on it for aid in these two
Indian wars. Jealous of English interference, they preferred to fight
their battles for themselves, and thus to give no excuse to the king
for maintaining royal troops in New England.
 71. Territorial Disputes (1649-1685).
MassachusettsMassachusetts early gave evidence of a desire to extend
extends her her territory. Disputes in regard to lands frequently gave
territory.
rise to quarrels with the Indians. In 1649 the strip of
mainland along Long Island Sound, between the western boundary
of Rhode Island and Mystic River, was granted to her by the federal
commissioners. From 1652 to 1658 she absorbed the settlements in
Maine, now neglected by the heirs of Gorges, just as in 1642-1643
she had annexed the New Hampshire towns. The council for foreign
plantations had been dissolved in 1675, and the management of
colonial affairs was resumed by a standing committee of the Privy
Council styled "the Lords of the Committee of Trade and
Plantations." At this time the Gorges and Mason heirs renewed their
respective claims to Maine and New Hampshire, which they said had
been wrongfully swallowed up by Massachusetts.
The king's Other complaints against the Bay Colony, that had been
charges allowed to slumber for some time, were now revived,
against
Massachusettsand the Lords of Trade, as they were familiarly called,
. were soon sitting in council upon the deeds of the
obstinate colony. The king's charges of early years were
again advanced: that the Acts of Navigation and Trade (page 104)
were not being observed; that ships from various European
countries traded with Boston direct, without paying duty to England
on their cargoes; that money was being coined at a colonial mint;
and that Church of England members were denied the right of
suffrage. Edward Randolph, a relative of the Masons, was sent over
(1676) to be collector at the port of Boston, now a town of five
thousand inhabitants, and to investigate the colonies. His manner
was insulting, and he was rudely treated by the people, who were
greatly embittered against England in consequence of his malicious
reports to the home government.
New In 1679 the king erected New Hampshire into a separate
Hampshire a royal province. Edward Cranfield, a tyrannical man,
royal province.
became the governor (1682), but his conduct drove the
people into insurrection. He was obliged to fly to the West Indies
(1685), and in the same year New Hampshire was reunited to
Massachusetts.
In 1665 the royal commissioners detached Maine from
Massachusetts
purchases Massachusetts; but three years later (1668) that
Maine.
commonwealth calmly took it back again. Gorges was
inclined to make trouble, and agents of Massachusetts quietly
purchased his claim (1677) for £1,250. The skilful manœuvre excited
the displeasure of the king, who had intended himself to buy out the
claims of Gorges, in order to erect Maine into a proprietary province
for his reputed son, the Duke of Monmouth. The company of
Massachusetts Bay now governed Maine under the Gorges charter as
lord proprietor, and did not make it a part of the Massachusetts
colony.

72. Revocation of the Charters (1679-1687).

The It was two years later (1679) before Charles was ready
Massachusetts
again to make a movement upon Massachusetts. He
charter
annulled. demanded that Maine should be delivered up to the
Crown, on repayment of the purchase money, and also
that all other complaints should at once be satisfied. The General
Court gave an evasive answer, and adopted its usual method of
sending over agents to ward off hostilities by a policy of delay. But in
1684 the blow came: a writ of quo warranto was issued against the
simple trading charter under which Massachusetts had so long been
permitted to grow and prosper; the charter was held to be annulled,
and the colony now became a royal possession.
Arrival of With the death of Charles II. (1685), James II. came to
Andros. the English throne. As a Roman Catholic, and imbued
with a taste of absolute power, the colonies had little favor to expect
from him. In 1686, as a step towards abolishing the American
charters, James sent over Sir Edmund Andros as governor of
Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Hampshire, and Maine; he brought
authority to ignore all local political machinery and to govern the
country through a council, the president of which was Joseph
Dudley, the unpopular Tory son of the stern old Puritan who had
been Winthrop's lieutenant. The charters of Rhode Island and
Connecticut were demanded for annulment (1686). The former
colony was, as usual, obedient, and yielded up her charter;
Connecticut failed to respond to the demand of Andros, and he went
to Hartford (October, 1687) and ordered the charter to be produced.
A familiar myth alleges that the document was concealed from him
in the hollow trunk of a large tree, known ever after as the "charter
oak;" nevertheless Andros arbitrarily declared the colony annexed to
the other New England colonies which he governed.
His despotic The following year (1688) Andros was also made
rule. governor of New York and the Jerseys, his jurisdiction
now extending from Delaware Bay to the confines of New France,
with his seat of government at Boston. The government of Andros
was despotic, and fell heavily on a people who had up to this time
been accustomed to their own way. Episcopal services were held in
the principal towns, and Congregational churches were frequently
seized upon for the purpose; the writ of habeas corpus was
suspended; a censorship of the press was restored, with Dudley as
censor; excessive registry fees were charged; arbitrary taxes were
levied; land grants made under former administrations were
annulled; private property was unsafe from governmental
interference; common lands were enclosed and divided among the
friends of Andros; the General Court was abolished, and most
popular rights were ignored. Dudley tersely described the situation
(1687) on the trial of the Rev. John Wise, of Ipswich, for heading a
movement in that town to resent taxation without representation:
"Mr. Wise, you have no more privileges left you than not to be sold
for slaves."

73. Restoration of the Charters (1689-1692).

Andros In April, 1689, news came of the Revolution in England,
deposed. the flight of the arrogant James, and the accession of
the Prince of Orange. The example of revolt was already
foreshadowed in Boston, where Andros and Dudley were deposed.
Elsewhere in the Northern colonies the representatives of the tyrant
extortioners were driven out. The Protestant sovereigns, William and
Mary, were proclaimed amid great popular rejoicings.
New England The old charters were restored for the time. In
under WilliamSeptember, 1691, Plymouth and the newly acquired
and Mary.
territory of Acadia were united to Massachusetts under a
new charter, which had been secured from the king chiefly through
the agency of the Rev. Increase Mather, of Boston, now influential in
colonial politics, as were also other members of the Mather family. In
May following (1692) this new charter for Massachusetts was
received at Boston. It was not as liberal as had been hoped. The
people were allowed their representative assembly as before, but
the governor was to be appointed by the Crown; the religious
qualification for suffrage was abolished, a small property
qualification (an estate of £40 value, or a freehold worth £2 a year)
being substituted; laws passed by the General Court were subject to
veto by the king,—a provision fraught with danger to the colonists.
Thus Massachusetts became a Crown charter colony,—a position not
uncomfortable so long as the executive and the legislature could
agree. The first royal governor, Sir William Phipps (1692-1695),
proved to be popular, generous, and well-meaning. He had a
romantic history, but was of slender capacity, and owed his
appointment to the favor of his pastor, Increase Mather.
Connecticut and Rhode Island received their charters back; New
Hampshire was governed by its new proprietor, Samuel Allen, but
without a charter; Maine continued under Massachusetts,—the Bay
Colony now extending from Rhode Island to New Brunswick, except
for the short intervening strip of New Hampshire coast.
It was fortunate for American liberty that the scheme of a
consolidation of the New England colonies was put forward by the
Stuarts too late for accomplishment. It was also fortunate that
Massachusetts was flanked by and often competed with by her
neighbors, Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New
Hampshire, who were protected against her by a jealous
government in England, and that the Dutch cut off her ambitious
territorial aspirations to the west. In the separate colonial life was
sown the spirit of local patriotism which is now embodied in the
American States. In New England, as in the South, there was a
leading, but never a dominant, colony; the smaller colonies shared
the experiences of the larger, but were freer from calamitous
changes, and enjoyed in some respects governments which were
more immediately under the control of the people.
The end of the century saw all the New England colonies established
on what seemed a permanent basis of loyalty to the Crown and of
local independence.

CHAPTER VIII.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN NEW ENGLAND IN

1700.

74. References.
Bibliographies.—Same as §§ 47 and 63, above; Channing and
Hart, Guide, § 130.
Historical Maps.—Same as § 47, above.
General Accounts.—Osgood, Colonies; Doyle, Colonies, III. ch. ix.;
Lodge, Colonies, ch. xxii.; W. Weeden, Economic and Social History;
J. Bishop, History of American Manufactures; American Statistical
Association Publications, No. 1.
Special Histories.—Manners and customs: Earle, Costumes of
Colonial Times, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, Sabbath
in Puritan New England, and Stage Coach and Tavern Days; W. Bliss,
Colonial Times on Buzzard's Bay, and Old Colony Town; F. Child,
Colonial Parsons of New England; J. Felt, Customs of New England;
Fisher, Men, Women, and Manners, I. chs. ii.-v.; Howe, Puritan
Republic, chs. v.-ix.; W. Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days; M. Ward,
Old Colony Days; Wharton, Colonial Days and Dames.—Education: C.
Johnson, Old Time Schools and School Books; E. Brown, Making of
our Middle Schools.—Theology: B. Adams, Emancipation of
Massachusetts; F. Foster, New England Theology; M. Greene,
Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut; C. F. Adams,
Antinomianism.—Press: C. Duniway, Freedom of Press in
Massachusetts; G. Littlefield, Early Massachusetts Press; R. Roden,
Cambridge Press.—Slavery: G. Moore, Slavery in Massachusetts; G.
Williams, Negro Race in America, 1619-1880; W. Dubois,
Suppression of Slave Trade.—On the witchcraft delusion: C. Upham,
Salem Witchcraft; S. Drake, Annals of Witchcraft; J. Taylor,
Witchcraft Delusion in Connecticut.—Medical practice: O. Holmes,
Medical Profession in Massachusetts. See also, biographies of
prominent men.
Contemporary Accounts.—Same as § 63, above.

75. Land and People.

Geography. North of Cape Cod the shores of New England are
rugged and forbidding, though the coast-line is indented
by numerous inlets from the sea, affording safe anchorage. To the
south of the cape there are also abundant harbors; but the
mountains nowhere approach the shore, and the beach is wide, with
a sand strip extending for some distance inland, while treacherous
shoals are not uncommon. The rivers, except those in Maine and the
Merrimac and the Connecticut, are small, and have their sources in
innumerable small lakes; the upper streams fall in successions of
picturesque cascades, the water-power of which is often profitably
utilized in manufacturing; and the larger rivers are held back by
great dams, about which have grown up the manufacturing towns of
Manchester, Nashua, Lowell, Lawrence, Holyoke, and many others.
Two ranges of mountains traverse New England: the Green
Mountains and their continuation, the Berkshire Hills, run nearly
north and south from Canada to Connecticut; the White Mountains
form a group, rather than a chain, nearer the coast. In the eastern
half of Maine the low watershed comes down to within one hundred
and forty miles of the sea-shore, and the Atlantic-coast region may
be said practically to end there. The highest elevation in the
Appalachian system north of North Carolina is Mount Washington
(six thousand two hundred and ninety feet), in the White Mountain
range. The soil of New England is for the most part thin, and
interspersed with rocks and gravel. The banks of some of the
principal rivers are enriched by alluvial deposits left by overflows;
there are fair pasturage lands in Vermont and New Hampshire, while
Maine, back from the shore, has much good soil. The New England
hills are rich in quarries of fine building stone. Their mineral wealth
is not great; iron and manganese have been found in considerable
quantities, together with some anthracite coal, lead, and copper.
Originally New England was one vast forest, and the trees had to be
cleared away in order to prepare the soil for cultivation. The climate
is subject to rapid variations, being generally accounted superb in
the summer and autumn; but the winters are long and severe, and
the springs late and brief.
The natural obstacles to human welfare in New England were great;
but the English settlers were men of tough fibre and rare
determination. They were not daunted by rugged hills, gloomy
forest, harsh climate, and niggardly soil. With courageous toil they
built up thrifty towns along the narrow slope, and erected enduring
commonwealths, in which the English institutions to which they had
been accustomed were reproduced, and often improved upon.
The The population of New England in 1700, by which time a
population. second generation of Englishmen had arisen in America,
is roughly estimated at about a hundred and five thousand souls, of
whom seventy thousand were in Massachusetts and Maine, five
thousand in New Hampshire, six thousand in Rhode Island, and
twenty-five thousand in Connecticut. The people were almost wholly
of pure English stock. Up to 1640, when the first great Puritan
exodus ceased, full twenty thousand English Dissenters, mainly from
the eastern counties of England, came to New England; thenceforth
the population, says Palfrey, "continued to multiply on its own soil
for a century and a half, in remarkable seclusion from other
communities." During this time there was a small infusion of
Normans from the Channel Islands, Welsh, Scotch-Irish (chiefly in
1652 and 1719), and Huguenots (1685). It is computed that at the
opening of the Revolutionary War ninety-eight per cent of New
England people were English or unmixed descendants of
Englishmen. Nowhere else in the American colonies was there so
homogeneous a population, or one of such uniformly high quality. As
said Stoughton, lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts (1692-1701):
"God sifted a whole nation, that he might send choice grain over into
this wilderness."

76. Social Classes and Professions.

Classes. Social distinctions were almost as sharply drawn in New
England as in the South. There was a powerful and
much-respected aristocratic class, beginning with the village "squire"
and ending with the Crown officials in the capital towns. "The
foundations of rank," says Lodge, "were birth, ancestral or individual
service to the State, ability, education, and to some extent wealth."
The recognized classes were, in order of precedence, gentlemen,
yeomen, merchants, and mechanics; and at church the people were
punctiliously seated according to station. Down to 1772 the students
in Harvard College were carefully arranged in the catalogue in the
order of their social rank, the Hutchinsons, Saltonstalls, Winthrops,
and Quincys near the head. There was also a distinction between
new-comers and old-comers, the "old family" class laying some
pretensions to social superiority. The aristocrats were not men of
leisure,—everybody in New England worked; but the public offices
and the professions were reserved for gentlemen. Now and then
some of them conducted large estates, although aristocracy was not,
as in England, supported on landed possessions and primogeniture.
The force of public opinion alone separated the classes; with the
growth of the democratic idea, social barriers ultimately weakened,
although they continued to appear in the politics of the
commonwealth down to the middle of the present century.
Slavery. Slaves were comparatively few in number, the greater
part of them being house and body servants, and they
were not harshly treated; travellers have left record of the fact that
some of the humbler farmers ate at table with their human chattels.
The race was, however, generally despised, and in one of the old
churches in Boston is still to be seen the lofty "slaves' gallery." Judge
Samuel Sewall issued the first public denunciation of slavery in
Massachusetts, in a pamphlet issued in 1700, wherein he denounced
"the wicked practice." For many years this distinguished jurist and
diarist followed up his assaults, allowing no opportunity to escape
wherein he might espouse the cause of the oppressed "blackamores"
and mitigate the severity of the laws against them. But the colonists
in general saw nothing in the system to shock their moral sense, and
it was not until the Revolution that anti-slavery ideas began, in New
England, to spread beyond a narrow circle of humanitarians.
The legal There was a full system of courts, ranging from the
profession. colonial judges down to the justices of the peace and
"commissioners of small causes," appointed by colonial authority in
each town. The magistrates were uniformly men of good character,
of the upper, well-educated class, and rendered substantial justice,
although not specially trained in the law. The legal profession was
practically neglected throughout the seventeenth century, doubtless
owing in great part to lack of facilities for study and to the
overtowering importance of the ministry; we do not read of a
professional barrister in Massachusetts until 1688. There was,
however, no lack of litigation; personal disputes were rife in Rhode
Island, and in Connecticut there were frequent legal contests
between towns regarding lands. Between the colonies, also, there
were complicated and hotly-contested boundary disputes. The bar
gained strength, but it was not till about the middle of the
eighteenth century that it stood beside the ministry.
The ministry.We have had frequent evidences, in preceding chapters,
of the large influence of the clergy in the temporal
affairs of New England. The ranks of the Puritan ministry contained
men of the best ability and station; they were pre-eminently the
strongest class, and as the popular leaders, deeply impressed their
character upon the laws and institutions of the community. They
were held in great affection and reverence; but in a body of sturdy,
intelligent parishioners they could maintain their supremacy only by
the exercise of superior mental gifts: their calling was one offering
rich rewards for excellence, and attracted to it men of the finest
calibre, like the Mathers and Hooker. The sloth or the dullard was
soon taught by his people that he had mistaken his calling. Jonathan
Edwards, although of a later period than that of which we are
treating, was a fair type, and his early resolution "to live with all my
might while I do live," was an expression of the spirit which
dominated his order.
Medicine. It was an age in which quackery flourished. The regular
physicians, though excellent men and highly regarded by
the people, depended upon nostrums, and had little medical
knowledge; they were in the main "herb-doctors" and "blood-
letters." Many of the practitioners were barbers, and others
clergymen. "This relation between medicine and theology," writes Dr.
Holmes, "has existed from a very early period; from the Egyptian
priest to the Indian medicine-man, the alliance has been maintained
in one form or another. The partnership was very common among
our British ancestors." There were few facilities for the study of
medicine in the colonies until after the Revolution. The first medical
school in America was established in Philadelphia, about 1760.
 77. Occupations.
Domestic Unlike the Southern colonists, New Englanders were
manufactures. dependent on England only for the most important
manufactures. Mechanics were sufficiently numerous in every
community. The lumber industry was important, and in Connecticut
and Massachusetts there was profitable iron mining, which gave rise
to several kindred pursuits. There being abundant water-power,
small saw and grist mills were numerous; there were many tanneries
and distilleries; the Scotch-Irish in Massachusetts and New
Hampshire made linens and coarse woollens, and beaver hats and
paper were manufactured on a small scale. The people were largely
dressed in homespun cloth, and a spinning-wheel was to be found in
every farm-house. It was not until after the Revolution, however,
that New England manufacturing interests attained much
magnitude; the home government, through the Acts of Navigation
and Trade (page 104), had discouraged, as far as possible, American
efforts in this direction.
Fisheries. The fisheries, particularly whale and cod, were an
important source of income, those of Massachusetts
being estimated, in 1750, at £250,000 per year. Fishers' hamlets,
with their great net-reels and drying stages, were strung along the
shores. The men engaged in the traffic were hardy and bold, no
weather deterring them from long voyages to Newfoundland and
Labrador, while whale-fishers ventured into the Arctic seas. From
their ranks were largely recruited the superb sailors who made the
American navy famous in the two wars with England.
A pinnace, called the "Virginia," was constructed by the
Shipbuilding.
Popham colonists in 1607,—the first ocean-going vessel
built in New England. Shipbuilding was first undertaken at Plymouth
in 1625, and in Massachusetts six years later (1631). By 1650 New
England vessels were to be seen all along the coast, and carried the
bulk of the export cargoes. Before 1724 English ship carpenters
complained of American competition. In 1760 ships to the extent of
twenty thousand tons a year were being turned out of American
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