Where Are the Outsiders?

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the historic narrative of Dogtown, Massachusetts, a New England outsider community. The shift from insider to outsider community in the early nineteenth century is examined by placing the documentary record side by side with the past and present landscape. The constructed nature of the historic narrative along with today’s physical space is unpacked, arguing that Dogtown’s communal identity is still an unknown and that the modern understanding of the community has been constructed in the one hundred years since site abandonment.