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Milford, T. A. The Gardiners of Massachusetts: Provincial Ambition and the British-American Career. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. 306 pages. $24.95 (paperback).
In The Gardiners of Massachusetts, T. A. Milford tells the history of an ambitious, professional middle class and their role within the first British Empire and the new United States. He tells this history by means of three generations of the Gardiner family in Massachusetts. First was Silvester Gardiner, medical doctor and apothecary turned merchant and landowner, who remained loyal to the British Crown and the Church of England and so was exiled from revolutionary Massachusetts. Second was Silvester's son, John Gardiner, a lawyer educated in the Inns of Court who practiced in Wales and then on St. Kitts during the revolutionary period. John, a Whig, returned to Massachusetts after the Revolution, reclaimed his father's estate, and...