Can someone help me find information on American colonial governments?
You probably need to go to your local library to access the full text of this article. Below is the portion that appears to be what you looking for. A town meeting is an assembly of all the qualified voters in a town for the purpose of engaging in town legislative and electoral activities. English Puritan colonists created the town meeting shortly after they arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early seventeenth century. It is direct democracy in its purest form. Though town meetings have probably never been, in practice, as democratic as the contemporary popular mind imagines, the popular American political culture often preserves a romantic and nostalgic view of the New England town meeting. When some early-twentieth-century Progressives campaigned for direct democracy (the popular initiative and referendum), they often argued that they were building on the New England town meeting and bringing a new form of direct democracy to modern cities and states. The origins of the t
