Firth Haring Fabend

Novelist and museum consultant Fabend, a direct descendant of the original Haring settler, follows five generations of the family of New York and New Jersey in an attempt to uncover the economic, political, and religious underpinnings of the middle colonies. Researching court, tax, and probate records, she finds that the Harings in America reflected their Dutch origins: they were entrepreneurial farmers who lived in nuclear families and acted in their economic and political self interest. She also verifies the conclusions of family historians of the last 20 years who have documented colonial demographic patterns which bear resemblance to current trends. Though overstating the Harings's representative stature and relying upon such post-agrarian concepts as class to analyze colonial America, the author provides a much-needed investigation of life in the middle colonies. This book will appeal to colonial, family, and social historians.

Firth Haring Fabend finds the explanation in the devotion of the Reformed Dutch Church membership to the doctrines and traditions of their church. She looks at the individual and personal beliefs and behaviors of this often-neglected ethnic group. Thus, Zion on the Hudson presents both a broad and an intimate look at the way one mainstream Protestant denomination dealt with the transformative events of the evangelical era.

As Fabend describes the efforts of the Dutch to preserve the European standards and traditions of their church, while developing a taste for a new kind of theology and a preference for an American identity, she documents how Dutchness finally became a historical memory. The Americanization of the Reformed Dutch Church, Fabend writes, is a microcosm of the story of the Americanization of the United States itself.