This is a fascinating study of cultural memory in which John McWilliams examines nine ‘crises’ in New England history prior to the American Civil War. He summarises each episode, discusses how contemporaries viewed it and then examines how it was interpreted over time by clergy, historians, well-known literary figures and popular novelists. Much of the focus is on the reinterpretation of the region's history by the nineteenth-century historians George Bancroft and John Gorham Palfrey. Two of the events analysed – the ‘Antinomian Crisis’ and the Salem witchcraft trials – deal with events that had a specifically religious purpose, and will thus be of most interest to readers of this Journal, though such is the attention that has been paid to those episodes that there is little that will be new to those familiar with the recent historiography.