town meetings

Examples of town meetings in the following topics:

• Colonial Cities

  • Every male citizen had a voice in the town meeting.
  • The town meeting levied taxes, built roads, and elected officials who managed town affairs.
  • The towns did not have courts—that was a function of a larger unit, the county, whose officials were appointed by the state government.
  • Each city, and most towns, had private academies for the children of affluent families.

• Formal Communications

  • Examples include a variety of types of meetings, including a "cascade" of team meetings or briefings, conferences, site visits, consultation forums, "brown bag" lunches, round-table discussions, and "town meetings. "

• Politics

  • Political participation refers to whether or not a person votes in elections, donates to campaigns, or attends public forums where decisions are made, such as town meetings or city council meetings, for example.

• Colonies in Crisis

  • Andros, commissioned governor of New England in 1686, had earned the enmity of the local populace by enforcing the restrictive Navigation Acts, denying the validity of existing land titles, restricting town meetings, and appointing unpopular regular officers to lead colonial militia, among other actions that were part of an attempt to bring the colonies under the closer control of the crown.

• Early New England Society

  • The town meeting levied taxes, built roads, and elected officials who managed town affairs, and every male citizen had a voice in the town meeting.
  • The towns did not have courts; courts were instead a function of a larger unit, the county, and court officials were appointed by the colony government.
  • These local goods were shipped to towns and cities all along the Atlantic Coast, and enterprising men set up stables and taverns along wagon roads to service these trade routes.
  • All of the provinces and many towns tried to foster economic growth by subsidizing projects that improved the infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, inns, and ferries.
  • In the towns and cities, there was strong entrepreneurship and a steady increase in the specialization of labor.

• The Dominion of New England

  • He disregarded local representation, denied the validity of existing land titles in Massachusetts (which had been dependent on the old charter), restricted town meetings, and actively promoted the Church of England in largely Puritan regions.
  • Several towns refused to choose commissioners to assess the town population and estates, and officials from a number of them were consequently arrested and brought to Boston.
  • Andros, responding to the tax protests, sought to restrict town meetings, since these were where that protest had begun.
  • He introduced a law that limited meetings to a single annual meeting, solely for the purpose of electing officials and explicitly banned meetings at other times for any reason.
  • Protests were made that the town meeting and tax laws were violations of the Magna Carta, which guaranteed taxation by representatives of the people.

• Scenario

  • Samstonian is a small suburban town about thirty minutes south of a large metropolitan area.
  • Most of the residents work for Nikron, a packaging factory on the outskirts of town.
  • Because of the company's desire to maintain strong relations with the community, Nikron welcomed the town's help in further investigating the incident.
  • The group investigating the death of the fish decided to make further contacts, such as meeting with the newspaper reporter who broke the story, and interviewing townspeople who regularly fished in the river.
  • Samples revisited the original question with the entire class: Is the town's water supply being contaminated by pollutants from the factory?

• Mill Towns and Company Towns

  • One of the first company towns in the United States was Pullman, Chicago, developed in the 1880s just outside the Chicago city limits.
  • The town, entirely company-owned, provided housing, markets, a library, churches, and entertainment for the 6,000 company employees and an equal number of dependents.
  • In 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court required Pullman to dissolve their ownership of the town.
  • At their peak there were more than 2,500 company towns, housing 3% of the US population.
  • Mill towns, sometimes planned, built, and owned as a company town, grew in the shadow of the industries.

• Lexington and Concord

  • Tensions continued to rise throughout the colonies, and especially in New England, after the Boston Tea Party and the meeting of the First Continental Congress.
  • As in 1768, the British again occupied the town.
  • General Gage stationed 3,500 troops in Boston, and from there he ordered periodic raids on towns where guns and gunpowder were stockpiled, hoping to impose law and order by seizing them.
  • He persuaded the town's selectmen to surrender all private weapons in return for promising that any inhabitant could leave town.

• Women in the West

  • While some women could find employment in the newly settled towns as teachers, cooks, or seamstresses, they originally were deprived of many rights.
  • For the vast majority of women, work was not in towns for money, but on the farm.
  • People living in rural areas created rich social lives for themselves, often sponsoring activities that combined work, food, and entertainment, such as barn raising, corn husking, quilting bees, Grange meetings, church activities, and school functions.
  • In 1860, in the Comstock Lode region of Nevada, for example, there were reportedly only 30 women in a town with some 2,500 men.
  • Even fewer arrived to support their husbands or operate stores in the mining towns.