Puritans: The Original Republicans?
What political legacy did the Puritans leave to America? There was a time when historians commonly portrayed the Puritans as America’s founding democrats. No one better articulated this view than...
View ArticleThe Puritans: Neither Democratic nor American?
As I discussed in my post “Puritans: The Original Republicans?“, few historians today remain interested in Puritanism as the seedbed of American democracy. But as demonstrated by Michael Winship’s...
View ArticleUnderstanding the Puritans
The scholarly study of the Puritans has been marked in recent years by attempts to understand them in a fully transatlantic context. This follows a broader trend in early American history to focus on...
View ArticlePilgrims and Puritans
“Pilgrim” just has a much nicer ring to most eyes than “puritan.” On one level, the Pilgrims (who didn’t become the Pilgrims until the early nineteenth century) receive far more attention than they...
View ArticlePuritans Revisited
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller firmly tethered puritan to hypocrisy, self-righteousness, prudery, and the irrational execution of alleged witches. The term still resonates. It is easy for...
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