What Is Concord's Rise To Revolution?

1. While conducting his research, Robert Gross met a great deal of difficulty discovering the range of life that the commoners experienced on the eve of the Revolution. Moreover, Gross realized that “To recover the history of common people required new methods to exploit sources beyond the letters, journals, memoirs, essays, and sermons produced exclusively by “the most affluent and educated class of people (p. ix-x).” As mentioned in the preceding quote, it is far easier to uncover history about the lives of the opulent, because they have both the time and the resources unwittingly develop primary source documents throughout their lives. “Conceived of as a social being, a composite type that emerged from analysis of local records, the common colonist lost individual variation and initiative, becoming confined within the anonymizing and slowly evolving deep structures of social patterns …show more content…
In Concord in particular, the growth of religious zeal was influenced by Daniel Bliss. He reinvigorated religion so completely that, “for a time, religious meetings were held every day of the week. And in October 1741, the great English evangelist George Whitfield came to town and preached to thousands in the open air (p. 19-20).” Throughout this time period, the shifting of land from father to son was a lengthy process. This was especially true in families that had more than one son. This topic is discussed in the chapter A World of Scarcity, which aids in illustrating the root of this issue. During the pre revolution era, it was common place for the eldest son to inherit any excess property, while the other siblings were left to create their own fortune. This created tension in the family and left the other sons “dependent on his father’s good will (p. 75)” if they remained unable to carve themselves a