A Factious People - by Patricia U Bonomi (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book 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.

Review Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.