Community
>The values and ideals of communities into which we are born, or we join voluntarily, channel our desires and define us as social beings. But communities are exclusive, defining themselves in terms of who belongs and who does not. Within communities there are those with more power, influence and control, and those with less.
Families and communities have been important factors in the economic and political development of central North America. The fur-trading economy of the 17th and 18th century moved along family networks that spanned the cultural divide between American Indians and European traders. Likewise, the European-American farming economy that developed in the mid-19th century required the unpaid labor of family members. Networks of related families often settled near each other, supporting each other with shared labor, access to credit, and leisure time entertainment.
The meaning of community changed as more people moved from the countryside into the city. Despite their size and sense of anonymity, industrial cities harbored smaller circles of interaction—ethnic and religious neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and suburbs—where people tried to recreate older notions of community in a modern setting. And they fostered “imagined communities,” to borrow the term coined by the scholar Benedict Anderson. These imagined communities relied less on face-to-face interactions than on a shared understanding of experience and history that circulated in newspapers, books, and pamphlets.
The stories European settlers told each other about the hardships of frontier life, about their interactions with American Indians, and about the greatness of the society they were building, bound them together in an imagined community that called itself a nation. The Scots-Irish in Canada and the Yankees in the U.S. drew on the story of subduing a wild continent to justify their own power within Canada and the U.S. In turn, their symbols of nation-building—stalwart pioneers, rugged cowboys, dangerous Indians—were often adopted by newer arrivals to North America who struggled to make a place for themselves in their adopted home.
Imagined communities in North America had a profound impact on the history of Europe. Much as immigrants do today, those of the 19th century maintained contacts with their roots by writing letters and sending money, reading in their native language, and participating in the political life of their home countries. Their lives were “transnational,” connecting old world and new despite enormous distances.
