In this celebrated analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Michael J. Colacurcio presents a view of the author as America's first significant intellectual historian. Colacurcio shows that Hawthorne's fiction responds to a wide range of sermons, pamphlets, and religious tracts and debates--a variety of moral discourses at large in the world of provincial New England. Informed by comprehensive historical research, the author shows that Hawthorne was steeped in New England historiography, particularly the sermon literature of the seventeenth century. But, as Colacurcio shows, Hawthorne did not merely borrow from the historical texts he deliberately studied; rather, he is best understood as having written history. In The Province of Piety, originally published in 1984 (Harvard University Press), Hawthorne is seen as a moral historian working with fictional narratives--a writer brilliantly involved in examining the moral and political effects of Puritanism in America and recreating the emotional and cultural contexts in which earlier Americans had lived.

This book describes and analyses the provincial government's role in municipal and regional planning. The conversion of farmland to urban and other uses is discussed, as are the issues raised by the reports of the Ontario Planning Act Review Committee and the Federal/Provincial Task Force on the Supply and Price of Serviced Residential Land and the province's Green Paper on Planning for Agriculture. The authors criticize the government's failure to conduct cost-benefit studies before setting up planning programs and show that there is little factual basis for recent alarm over the disappearance of farmland. Data gathered here for the first time show that the conversion of agricultural land to built-up urban use and non-farm rural residential use in Ontario has been taking place quite slowly in view of the rate of productivity increase in agriculture, the stock of agricultural land, and the decline in the acreage of census farms. Economists will find in this book a useful survey of recent trends and policies. Planners, policy-makers, and students will welcome this detailed case study of how economic analysis ought to be used in formulating land use policies.