In 1886, the Town of Dedham published its first volume of printed records including births, deaths, and marriages (1635-1845). In 1888, they published the second volume, records from several churches, and inscriptions from cemeteries (1638-1845). Volume Three, Book One of the town records and a transcript of the Selectmen's Day Book (1636-1659), was published in 1892. The fourth volume, published in 1894, contains a complete transcript of the Town Meeting and Selectmen's Records contained in Book Three of the General Records of the town (1659-1673). This fifth volume "reproduces the record book known as Book Five, and is a continuation of the general records of the town and of the selectmen from the end of Book Three, the last published volume of ancient records." It contains "a large number of tables of tax assessments. The tables found in the first one hundred and ninety-two pages have here been reproduced in table form, but from that point the tables and figures have been omitted from the printed pages, but all the names found in the table have been printed." An illustration of the official town seal and separate indices to full-names and subjects augment the text.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists found the New World full of resources. With land readily available but workers in short supply, settlers developed coercive forms of labor—indentured servitude and chattel slavery—in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco. This brutal labor regime became common throughout most of the colonies. An important exception was New England, where settlers and their descendants did most work themselves. In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings were not simply sites of empty democratic rituals but were used to organize, force, and reconcile laborers, families, and entrepreneurs into profitable export economies. The town meetings protected the value of local labor by persistently excluding outsiders and privileging the town born. The town-centered political economy of New England created a large region in which labor earned respect, relative equity ruled, workers exercised political power despite doing the most arduous tasks, and the burdens of work were absorbed by citizens themselves. In a closely observed and well-researched narrative, Town Born reveals how this social order helped create the foundation for American society.