BY ALBERT BUSHNELL HART
Professor of Government Emeritus, Harvard University

Writers of history are prone to describe the growth of a
nation as though it were the growth of a tree -- from the roots
to a slip, a sapling, a young trunk; at last the full stately tree.
In this realization of a nation as a growth, it is easy to leave
out of account that just as the tree is an assemblage of cells,
so a community is the combination of the lives of all those
individuals who have been parts of the whole.

To portray even the outstanding individuals in the history
of Massachusetts would make this work a necrology rather
than a history. Nevertheless, it is impossible truly to tell the
story of Massachusetts without taking into account in each
volume at least one outstanding character, as a representa-
tive of the aspirations and the accomplishments of his gener-
ation; who exemplifies the standard, the aims, and the
successes of the Massachusetts group of which he was a part.

For the seventeenth century of Massachusetts history the
selection of such a typical, characteristic person is obvious.
John Winthrop, in his life of sixty-one years, passed through
the experiences of an English churchman, an English puritan,
a colonizer, an American puritan, and an upholder of a new
type of community life and enduring popular government,
which is interwoven in the fabric of modern American democ-
racy. The life of John Winthrop is the inner life of a new
community, of which he was the leader and guide in its first
critical decades.

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