Anderson, Virginia Dejohn 1954-

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Anderson, Virginia Dejohn 1954-

PERSONAL: Born July 3, 1954, in Hartford, CT; daughter of Anthony J. (a high school teacher) and Margaret (a registered nurse; maiden name, Gedeon) DeJohn; married Fred W. Anderson (a university professor), August 16, 1980; children: Samuel DeJohn Anderson. Education: University of Connecticut, B.A., 1976; University of East Anglia, M.A., 1979; Harvard University, A.M., 1979, Ph.D., 1984.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of History, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0234. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Colorado, Boulder, assistant professor, 1985–92, associate professor, 1992–2005, professor of U.S. history, 2005–.

MEMBER: American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Historical Society.

AWARDS, HONORS: Marshall Scholar, 1976–78; Walter Muir Whitehill Prize in New England Colonial History, 1984, for article "Migrants and Motives"; Best Subsequent Book award, Phi Alpha Theta, 2005, for Creatures of Empire.

WRITINGS:

New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Also author, with others, of the textbook The American Journey: A History of the United States. Contributor of articles to New England Quarterly and William and Mary Quarterly.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Research in colonial American history.

SIDELIGHTS: Virginia DeJohn Anderson provides a collective biography of New England's first English settlers in her 1991 book, New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century. Through a close examination of shipping records and legal docu-ments, Anderson delineates the motivations of English people for emigration to America, their experiences during the voyage, their settlement patterns, and the birth of the myth of the Great Migration. Anderson examined passenger lists of seven ships that departed from England between 1635 and 1638 bound for what became New England. From this sample of nearly seven hundred people (which constitutes less than ten percent of the population of the Great Migration), she draws a portrait of the early settlers as moderately successful Puritan artisans and farmers who chose to emigrate for predominantly religious rather than economic or political reasons. Based on records covering the ensuing decades, Anderson depicts what she calls the "Great Reshuffling," when individual families cast about New England for towns and communities that suited them and settled permanently. She discusses the unique stability of these communities, thanks in part to the relative prosperity, known as "competency," that the Puritans sought (and generally achieved) as a way to avoid the temptations of either great wealth or dire poverty.

New England's Generation was generally well received by critics. "The author has a fine historical imagination which makes the awesome experience of emigration come alive," observed Roger Thompson in a review in the Journal of American Studies. Kenneth Lockridge, in the Journal of Social History, emphasized "the exquisitely drawn … linkage of the material and the spiritual" in the lives of the Puritans, whereby goals and aspirations formed in the Old World were realized by the limited success to be found in the New. Many critics echoed the sentiments of the American Historical Review contributor Bruce E. Steiner, who wrote: "[Anderson] has been eminently successful in identifying and highlighting central tendencies: religion as the motive for removal, the migration's family character, the crucial marriage of piety and competency, and the relative stability … of early New England society." While Thompson identified "some serious shortcomings in New England's Generation"—specifically, the representativeness of Anderson's sample and her emphasis on nuclear rather than extended families of immigrants—he like other critics found much to applaud in New England's Generation. After enumerating his own caveats, Richard P. Gildrie, writing in the William and Mary Quarterly, concluded: "These reservations aside, this is a good book. It is especially insightful as economic history that successfully links individual and communal aspirations to geographic and social conditions."

Anderson's next book also deals with colonial American history. In Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, she examines how the cows, pigs, and sheep of seventeenth-century English settlers inadvertently led to those settlers conquering their neighboring Native American tribes. As Anderson shows, Native Americans and the colonists had sharply differing conceptions of the role of animals in society and on the ownership of the land necessary for grazing livestock, and both sides failed to understand the other's views. As the colonists' free-ranging herds encroached on the Native Americans' fields of corn, the two groups were thrown into conflict—conflicts that eventually grew violent and led to the English conquest. "Though the thesis is debatable," Charles L. Lumpkins wrote in the Library Journal, "scholars and interested lay readers will enjoy Anderson's lively, readable narrative." Writing in the Journal of British Studies, Michael J. Lansing also praised Anderson's "taut and lively prose," and concluded: "[Creatures of Empire] will be a prized reference for scholars of early America, the environment, colonialism, and the English Atlantic for years to come."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, April, 1993, Bruce E. Steiner, review of New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 552-553.

Booklist, October 1, 2004, Nancy Bent, review of Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, p. 290.

Journal of American Studies, December, 1992, Roger Thompson, review of New England's Generation, pp. 467-469.

Journal of British Studies, October, 2005, Michael J. Lansing, review of Creatures of Empire, p. 826.

Journal of Social History, spring, 1993, Kenneth Lockridge, review of New England's Generation, pp. 671-673.

Library Journal, September 15, 2004, Charles L. Lumpkins, review of Creatures of Empire, p. 67.

William and Mary Quarterly, October, 1994, Richard P. Gildrie, review of New England's Generation, pp. 792-794.