Growing Up Puritan: The Family in 17th-century New England

Description

An examination of childhood in seventeenth and early eighteenth century Massachusetts, with an emphasis on the family life of the diarist, councilor, and judge Samuel Sewall (1652–1729) and his wife Hannah (Hull) Sewall, and of their contemporaries. How did they approach birth, the illness and death of children, discipline, religious and secular education, preparation for a religious calling, courtship and marriage, and intergenerational relationships? What evidence have historians gathered to illuminate Puritan family life?

Biography

Judith Graham earned a BA in history from Brandeis University and a PhD in history at Boston College. She is the author of Puritan Family Life: The Diary of Samuel Sewall (2000) and the editor of Out Here at the Front: The World War I Letters of Nora Saltonstall (2004).

She was an editor at the Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, working on the papers of John Adams and the family correspondence, and she served as series editor of the two-volume Diaries and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams(2013). She is a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.