Editorial

Abstract

W assembling this issue of the Quarterly, I reflected on the irony of starting our new year in March. Beginning it on Lady Day, March 25th is, after all, more consistent with New England, England, and Scotland before the New Calendar Act of 1750 and reflects the more visceral feeling of the passage of winter to spring. Central heating, air conditioning, and cable news have, to some extent, smoothed out our sense of seasonal change and altered our indoor social encounters. Jordan E. Taylor in “Now in the Winter of our Dull Content: Seasonality and the Atlantic Communications Frontier in Eighteenth-Century New England” reminds us of that different time when seasons shaped communication and life in New England more explicitly. Taylor examines how winter affected the content of newspapers and provided New Englanders with different rhythms of sociability and connection. Ice-bound harbors and poor roads inhibited the flow of news to publishers of newspapers affecting production and distribution, limiting and altering content, and indicating a not entirely unwelcome milieu of isolation. Technological change, the development of icebreaker boats, the telegraph, and the transatlantic cable led to the greater social connectivity and integration that Americans saw as progress. Yet, as Taylor suggests, the defeat of winter by better technology and communication also had an adverse impact. As users of email and the internet recognize, constant communication (as electronic umbilical cords) can lead to an omnipresent connectivity and with it, lost opportunities for solitude, reflection, or alternative kinds of sociability. Taylor’s caution about the adverse consequences of better communication reminds us also of the complexities that