Boylston, Massachusetts, is the community in crisis. Mary Babson Fuhrer has mined the early records of this town situated on the northeastern fringes of Worcester in central Massachusetts. This “collective biography” (p. 251) is reminiscent of New England town studies of the 1970s, which similarly explain how traditional “corporate community” (p. 12) gave way to modernizing influences. While those earlier studies located that shift in the 1700s, Fuhrer locates it between 1815 and 1848, when Boylston experienced “unremitting turmoil” (p. 2). In 1850, the people of Boylston still farmed the land, but they now participated in networks that stretched well beyond the town, and they defined “community” to include those new networks.

Fuhrer created two databases for this massive archival project: one of all tax-paying citizens of Boylston in the first half of the nineteenth century; the other of every male born in Boylston between 1786 and 1825 (p. 251). Both databases draw from a wide array of town and county public records, account books, church records, personal diaries, and other sources. Fuhrer gives special place to the diary and correspondence of prosperous and socially prominent Boylston inhabitant Mary White and her family. A slice of low-status people might be missing because record-keepers tended to ignore them, but the scope of this study is impressive.

Fuhrer organizes her data chronologically and topically. She opens with a discussion of Boylston's history before 1815 (Chapter 1), and follows with a discussion of religious upheaval (Chapter 2) in the form of Congregationalist/Unitarian controversies, the Second Great Awakening, and the literal dismemberment of the town's old meeting house (p. 71) while Congregationalists, Baptists, and Unitarians vied for members. Chapter 3 is of particular interest to economic historians. Fuhrer describes a town that, hampered by lack of direct access to the Nashua River, canals, turnpikes, and railroads, continued to follow “customary rhythms of agricultural life” and only gradually moved to “a cash-based economy” (p. 77). The wealthiest and best connected bought up neighbors' land and practiced scientific farming to increase crop yields. Not surprisingly, many sons and daughters left the town in search of better opportunities, creating a labor shortage that was filled by “alien transients” (p. 94) and “culturally alien newcomers” (p. 95). Two appendices provide statistical support for Fuhrer's analysis of the changing economy (pp. 253–61).

Chapter 4 presents six mini-biographies that illustrate the “restless, striving, self-assertive” spirit of the generation that came of age in the early 1800s (p. 103). Fuhrer also peppers short biographies throughout the book, effectively conveying the “trials and transformation” of individual lives. The story of David Flagg, a farmer who damaged his land in his rush to extract profits, is particularly noteworthy (pp. 89–92).

Chapter 5 resumes the topical organization with a discussion of educational issues: controversies over public school curriculum and textbooks, the popularity of public lectures and debates, and the rise of private rural academies for children of the elite. Chapter 6 spotlights reform movements in the lively Boylston Temperance Society, the protracted debate over a Poor Farm, and the reluctant removal of some “distracted” residents from private homes to the Worcester Lunatic Asylum. Chapter 7 focuses on political issues that pitted Whigs against Democrats, especially suffrage, the national bank, and paper money. Chapter 8 discusses abolitionism, largely through the activity of the Boylston Antislavery Society, to which Mary White passionately gave her time and labor.

Crisis of Community has a wide appeal. Fuhrer keeps Boylston people at the center of the story as she moves deftly from one topic to another. She addresses the scholarship principally in discursive endnotes, which are interesting reading on their own. A wide audience will enjoy the narrative, and scholars will appreciate the four appendices, 1,000+ endnotes, and extensive bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. The book reproduces much of the author's admirable dissertation, but omits some of its extensive statistical appendices, which provide rich reading for economic historians (‘This Wilderness World’: The Evolution of a New England Farm Town, 1820–1840, University of New Hampshire, 2010: 413–61). Especially helpful is the dissertation's appendix on distribution of wealth (pp. 435–37).

This good book would have been even better with a stronger argument, theoretical underpinnings, and a clearer backstory. Fuhrer argues somewhat vaguely that Boylston's experience affirms the existing scholarly narrative of change during the industrial, transportation, and agricultural revolutions: “how big changes happened in a small community” (p. 2). She does not engage theories of race, class, and gender to help explain Boylston's trials and transformation, nor does she draw from growing fields such as family studies, memory studies, or history of emotions that might allow a more nuanced reading of the diaries of Mary White and others. Boylston's eighteenth-century prequel is perhaps the weakest section. Haphazard dating and a fuzzy timeline result in a confusing merger of events. Boylston was founded out of Shrewsbury in 1786, a fact mentioned only in an appendix (p. 251), so when the author refers to “early Boylston,” she means Shrewsbury. For data on “early Boylston,” she uses statistics from three Shrewsbury tax districts, information buried in another appendix (p. 261). The author's discussion of Shays' Rebellion (pp. 38–40) omits a pertinent discussion of the town's simultaneous founding. Fuhrer acknowledges that serious divisions troubled revolutionary Shrewsbury-Boylston (pp. 31–32); however, she does not consider these problems to have been a “crisis of community.” Boylston appears to have emerged from the Revolution and Shays' Rebellion with its traditional, communal order intact; in 1800, it was still “an uncomplicated agrarian town” and “an unremarkable farm community” that had not yet experienced a “time of turmoil” (p. 13). Given the upheaval of the revolutionary era, this seems unlikely.

These criticisms aside, A Crisis of Community is a remarkable accomplishment, the result of years of meticulous archival research. Mary Babson Fuhrer is to be commended for bringing Boylston's people out of the archives and introducing them to her readers.