"Middling People" or "Common Sort"?: The Social Origins of Some Early Americans Reexamined

Nearly two decades ago Mildred Campbell published a path-breaking essay entitled Social Origins of Some Early Americans.' The essay was quickly recognized as an important contribution, and it has since achieved a firmly established position as the most important quantitative study of the social origins of the English men and women who came to the British New World colonies in the seventeenth century.2