A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York - Softcover

Bonomi, Patricia U.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801456533 ISBN 13: 9780801456534

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2014

Synopsis

First published in 1971 and long out of print, this classic account of Colonial-era New York chronicles how the state was buffeted by political and sectional rivalries and by conflict arising from a wide diversity of ethnic and religious identities. New York's highly volatile and contentious political life, Patricia U. Bonomi shows, gave rise to a number of interest groups for whose support political leaders had to compete, resulting in new levels of democratic participation.

About this title

Review:

"After forty-five years, Patricia U. Bonomi's A Factious People remains one of the best studies of the politics of colonial New York, and one of the best studies of colonial politics generally. Ably researched, judiciously and clearly argued, its value to students of the period remains undiminished."

--Brendan McConville, Boston University, author of The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776

"Patricia U. Bonomi's wonderful book reads just as well now as when it was originally published. A Factious People is the liveliest and most accurate account of mid-eighteenth-century New York politics. Careful research, profound historical judgment, and graceful prose are in evidence on every page."

--Stanley N. Katz, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, coeditor of Colonial America

"A Factious People traces the gradual emergence of a highly developed political culture in colonial New York. Patricia U. Bonomi contends that the centrifugal nature of the colony's early development--the dispersion of settlement along the Hudson, the successive waves of culturally distinct migrants, the absence of a representative assembly until 1691--inhibited the creation of a stable polity."

--American Historical Review

"Patricia U. Bonomi's book is not merely good. It is remarkable. Displaying a rare gift for compression as well as mastery of both original and secondary sources, Bonomi surveys the politics of colonial New York."

--William and Mary Quarterly

"Patricia U. Bonomi's excursion into our eighteenth-century past gives us a good look at what we were like then and knocks off a few tightly held ideas along the way. If some of her people--the Morrises, the Livingstons, the Coldens--were living today, they would feel right at home in the shifty quagmires of contemporary politics."

--New York Times

About the Author:

Patricia U. Bonomi is Professor Emerita of History at New York University. She is the author of Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America and The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0801456533
• ISBN 13: 9780801456534
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 362