Read the following background about the development of English towns and their expansion in Massachusetts in the seventeenth-century.
These towns were a product, not of long continuous development, but instead, of a rapid process of town planning which was not constrained by existing physical structures and property lines of previous European settlement. The tightly clustered settlements of large and small land holders living adjacent to one another were focused on the meetinghouse and maintained a high degree of internal social order and self-maintenance. Attendance at religious worship and at town meetings was obligatory and enforced by town meeting. There was a strong sense of interdependency and community early on and on a daily basis. The nucleated village, one of many forms present in England during the medieval period, is associated with attempts to reorganize and control agricultural production and to facilitate control over the village's population through an emphasis on ordered land use and face-to-face observation of each villager's daily activities.
(from Susan McGowan, "The Landscape in the Colonial Period")
Read the background essay on your group's particular conflict: either New England's King Philip's War; Bacon's Rebellion or the Pueblo Revolt of 1680