Introduction

Our analysis of some of the quantitative aspects of education in a large number of communities has afforded us the opportunity to be systematic and comparative within a particular historical setting. But at the same time, studying all the towns of Massachusetts, or even eight selected Essex County towns, makes it difficult to capture the unique quality and meaning of educational developments in those communities. For these same reasons, the traditional case study method has maintained its appeal and its usefulness in educational history, as in social history generally.

Because we, too, wished for contact with the complexities of the local situation, we chose to complement our quantitative study of education in the towns with detailed studies of two communities. The two we chose, Boxford and Lynn, seem to have been at opposite ends of the development spectrum in the Massachusetts context. Boxford was a relatively insular, rural community, with a struggling economy and a declining population, whereas Lynn was an expanding, bustling center of the shoe industry. Of course, there is no single rural–urban continuum that links population size to other indexes of change in a predictable way for individual communities. Boxford should not be considered representative of all rural communities, nor does Lynn establish an invariant urban pattern. Many small towns in Massachusetts, unlike Boxford, were growing, were adopting innovations, and were trying to boost their way into economic prosperity.