This thesis deconstructs the documentary archive and built environment of the historical site called Dogtown in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The site consists of forty house foundation holes placed along four roads in the middle of Cape Ann's Dogtown forest. Originally settled by Europeans in the Colonial era as an English farming village, local history describes the community as transformed sometime after the American Revolution into a small “outsider community” consisting mainly of a population of poverty-stricken and aging, single English American women. These women are often labeled “witches” in the local folklore and are said to have co-habited with two African American individuals, only adding to their marginal status. This study's deconstruction of the historic narrative and how it has affected the cultural landscape begins to illuminate a constructed and interpreted history which makes the site appear to have been more “outside” of Gloucester than it once was.

The nature of constructing histories may affect changes to the narrative on a larger scale as well. For example, it is found that a similar reinterpretation could be applied to three other nineteenth century outsider communities in the northeastern United States: the Lighthouse community from northwestern Connecticut, the Ramapo Mountain People from the northern New Jersey/New York State border region, and a group of people who once lived on Malaga Island off of the mid-coast of Maine. These sites are not all exactly alike but the persistent rumors of immoral and antisocial behavior bind them all together in a broader Colonial landscape. These sites have all been constructed in their narratives to appear as they are today, i.e., outside the larger society. It is argued that the nineteenth and early twentieth century constructions of such histories of those who were included in the bourgeoning capitalist mode of production created a need for stories of their opposite, i.e., populations of marginalized people excluded from this way of life.