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Papers of the American Historical Association
Papers of the American Historical Association Author:American Historical Association Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE THEORY OF THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY. By Dr. Charles M. Andrews, Bryn Mawr College. The work of the new historical school has stimulated greatly a broader s... more »pirit of research and a sense of wholeness and continuity, which, until such stimulus was given, history has greatly lacked. The study of origins and developments has been rather a specialty of the school, and it has been discovered that the present and the past are not so widely separated as one has been inclined to think. In no single line has this method of investigation been so fruitful of new ideas regarding the institutional side of history as in the advancement of the theory that the smallest unit of social and political-life—on the one side, the family ; on the other, the village or town community—was the oldest, and that each existed before the larger forms came into being, and that each was the primordial germ whence has sprung the later social and political organization. Without defining the theory more carefully, it may be said that it has met with almost universal acceptance, and, as promoted by Maine, Freeman, and their scores of followers, is to be found in various forms of completeness in the majority of works, which, whether nearly or remotely, touch upon the subject. Such a comfortable sense of roundness does it give to the development of Anglo-Saxon institutions ; so wide has been its acceptance, and so strongly installed is it in the minds both of students and readers that it may seem more bold than discreet to raise the question regarding the soundness of the theory. And yet such a question must be raised, for the support is certainly inadequate to the structure raised thereon. The more conservative scholars have generally recognized this, and there is to be found a definite unwillingness among them to...« less