Village and community in early colonial New England

The long-standing correlation between community function and nucleated settlement form in early colonial New England is mistaken. Puritan communities were established, but new communities—often called villages in colonial records—were developed and survived quite well regardless of settlement form. As in England at the time, village meant community and community was a social web. Village status in New England provided a community with land and thus enabled the community to undertake settlement. But the social web that comprised community did not require nucleated settlement, and the dispersed settlement form that many colonists had known in England dominated the village landscape of early colonial New England.     

Antebellum Harvard students and the recreational exploration of the New England landscape

This paper examines a nineteenth-century geographic activity, the recreational exploration of the wilderness areas of northern New England and nearby environments by Harvard students. Conventions of literary expression and social behaviour spurred and shaped such activity, but undergirding these temporally-specific patterns were more universal characteristics of late-adolescent behaviour. Biological, anthropological and what may be called geographical imperatives led students to explore the limits of their regional environment and incorporate the values of the wilderness experience into their own maturational processes. The early journeys into the eastern wilderness of the geographical historian Francis Parkman are set in the context of these more universal institutional and behavioural patterns.     

THE ANTI-POVERTY EFFECT OF IN-KIND TRANSFERS: A “GOOD IDEA” GONE TOO FAR?”*

During the 1970's several policy analysts developed estimates of the effect of in-kind transfers (e.g., Food Stamps and Medicaid) on poverty. Unfortunately, many of these studies have, drastically overstated the antipoverty impact of in-kind transfers, leading some to claim that there are no mart? poor people in America. This article reviews these, studies, provides new evidence on the impact of in-kind benefits on poverty, and concludes that there is still a substantial poverty problem in America today which need be addressed by policymakers.