Essay #6. 145 (21972-!-item-!-188;#058&00145-00)
Colonial historian David Allen's intensive study of five communities in
seventeenth-century Massachusetts is a model of meticulous scholarship on the
detailed microcosmic level, and is convincing up to a point. Allen suggests
that much more coherence and direct continuity existed between English and
colonial agricultural practices and administrative organization than other
historians have suggested. However, he overstates his case with the
declaration that he has proved "the remarkable extent to which diversity in New
England local institutions was directly imitative of regional differences in
the mother country."
Such an assertion ignores critical differences between seventeenth-century
England and New England. First, England was overcrowded and land-hungry; New
England was sparsely populated and labor-hungry. Second, England suffered the
normal European rate of mortality; New England, especially in the first
generation of English colonists, was virtually free from infectious diseases.
Third, England had an all-embracing state church; in New England membership in
a church was restricted to the elect. Fourth, a high proportion of English
villagers lived under paternalistic resident squires; no such class existed in
New England. By narrowing his focus to village institutions and ignoring these
critical differences, which studies by Greven, Demos, and Lockridge have shown
to be so important, Allen has created a somewhat distorted picture of reality.
Allen's work is a rather extreme example of the "country community" school of
seventeenth-century English history whose intemperate excesses in removing all
national issues from the history of that period have been exposed by Professor
Clive Holmes. What conclusion can be drawn, for example, from Allen's
discovery that Puritan clergy who had come to the colonies from East Anglia
were one-third to one-half as likely to return to England by 1660 as were
Puritan ministers from western and northern England? We are not told in what
way, if at all, this discovery illuminates historical understanding. Studies
of local history have enormously expanded our horizons, but it is a mistake for
their authors to conclude that village institutions are all that mattered,
simply because their functions are all that the records of village institutions
reveal.
Question #19. 145-07 (22110-!-item-!-188;#058&000145-07)
It can be inferred from the passage that the author of the passage considers
Allen's "discovery" (see highlighted text) to be
(A) already known to earlier historians
(B) based on a logical fallacy
(C) improbable but nevertheless convincing
(D) an unexplained, isolated fact
(E) a new, insightful observation
ans D
我選了B 我感覺BD 有點類似 不知道怎麼刪除B
謝謝各位~~~
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