Yankee Destinies: The Lives of Ordinary Nineteenth-Century Bostonians

by Peter R. Knights

Overview

This book reconstructs important milestones in the lives of 2,808 white, native-born men who resided in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1860 or 1870. Selected systematically from the census for those two years, these men represent two cross-sections of those viewed by contemporaries as "typical" Bostonians.

Using a broad array of sources--manuscript census returns; tax assessments; city directories; birth, marriage, and death records for more than twenty states; cemetery records; newspapers; and family genealogies--Peter Knights traced these men not only back to their origins in hundreds of small New England towns but also (for those who left) onward from Boston. He determined changes in their occupations and wealth and after they arrived in Boston, the fates of their marriages, their production of children, and--in all but seventy cases--their deaths and the causes thereof. The result is a comprehensive quantitative study of important aspects of the lives of what are probably the largest sample population groups for any North American community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469620169
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	310
Lexile:	1470L (what's this?)
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Peter R. Knights is associate professor of history at York University.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Well written, exceptionally well documented, and authoritative, this book is a must buy for college and university libraries.—Choice

A unique scholarly work, a triumph over the barriers and obscurities of the historical records of the population of the United States. Although we pride ourselves on being a mobile people, we have in fact very little detailed information about how we have moved about. Thanks to Peter Knights, a scholar who has been devoting his entire life to these Boston studies, we now have in this book a benchmark for connecting the actualities of family life to interpretive studies of the family, the labor force, and urbanization.—Sam Bass Warner, Boston University

No one else has captured the lives of ordinary and not so ordinary nineteenth-century people as Peter Knights has, because no one else has had the ingenuity and persistence to trace a large sample of them—wherever they moved, whatever they did. Often charmingly written, deftly combining quantitative and qualitative information, lovingly detailed, Yankee Destinies is part detective story, part genealogy, part sociology, and all fascinating.—J. Morgan Kousser, California Institute of Technology

Editorial Reviews

Reconstructs important milestones in the lives of 2,808 white, native- born men who resided in Boston in 1860 or 1870, selected systematically from the census for those two years. Using a broad array of sources, Knights traced these men back to their origins and also onward from Boston. He determined changes in their occupations and wealth before and after they arrived in Boston, the fates of their marriages, their production of children, and--in all but 70 cases--their deaths and the causes thereof. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Well written, exceptionally well documented, and authoritative, this book is a must buy for college and university libraries.

Choice

A triumph over the barriers and obscurities of the historical records of the population of the United States.

Sam Bass Warner, Boston University

Often charmingly written, deftly combining quantitative and qualitative information, lovingly detailed . . . part detective story, part genealogy, part sociology . . . all fascinating.

J. Morgan Kousser, California Institute of Technology

From the Publisher