Word: hancocks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sitting in his office overlooking an expansive parking lot at Northeastern University, Fowler explains his interest in John Hancock. In the man who, for most, means life insurance. the skyscraper, or the hazy and not-too-interesting personage who endorsed the Constitution, Fowler sees a paradoxical politico. The dichotomous Hancock, generally acknowledged in his day as Boston's wealthiest citizen, became its most outspoken revolutionary. Fowler's examination demythifies...
Fowler spent nearly three years niggling back through the records of Hancock's life to prepare this scholarly work. Hancock's official record at Harvard, stored in the basement of Houghton Library, shed some light on his character. Although he entered Harvard at the precocious age of 13, he was an undistinguished student. He complained about the "rotten" food and usually ate at local alehouses, where he picked up a taste for rum. Fowler includes in the text some of the drinking songs Hancock composed while at school...
Demoted several places in his class rank for disorderly drinking shortly after he moved into Massachusetts Hall, Hancock was among the rowdiest at the College. Fowler's theory that the "intellectual crosswinds" Hancock encountered at Harvard engendered his later liberalism is questionable. Those same crosswinds haven't deterred many others from the allure of financial security and conservatism...
...city's development as an urban entity, Fowler shows, corresponded to the undoing of America as a Crown Colony. He necessarily includes in his work many pages of U.S. history. In fact, the narrative so often digresses from Hancock's life, it takes on the form of a multi-faceted history of the period, using Hancock's life as a departure point...
...FOWLER insists his book is a biography, "part of the new philosophical context in which historians are attempting to analyze history." Fowler's contribution to the field--the first definitive biography of Hancock, fully annotated, indexed, and even illustrated--is valuable less as a philosophical work than for its interdisciplinary and objective treatment of history. A thoroughly analytical history might have contributed more significantly to the field...