17th century America
“The Puritan Experience” on YouTube
Here is another video about the Puritans that I found by typing “New England Puritans” into YouTube. It is called “The Puritan Experience: Making of a New World” and it is an episode in a continuing story:
It is an interesting mixture of truth and myth. Apparently the protagonists are a family [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Revolutionary Myth #4: All was well before the war
Part four of our series on 5 Myths about the Revolutionary War dwells on the pre-war period.
In the shorthand version of American history, the colonial period is one of peace and prosperity right up to the 1770s. But especially in New England, the 17th and 18th centuries were strewn with political conflict and open war.
Canada [...]
What caused the Revolutionary War?
I’ve been thinking about this question outside the context of New England, looking at the whole of the 13 American colonies (and even the British Caribbean) to figure out what led to revolution in the 18th century.
It’s easy to see how the Puritan New England colonies almost instantly developed a sense of their own nationhood, separate [...]
What caused the witch trials in Salem?
Part the last of our Truth v. Myth series on the 1692 witch scare in Salem. Here we try to figure out what led rational, if religious, people to fear that multiple witches were at work in their community.
As I’ve pointed out earlier, while the Puritans did believe in the Devil and evil spirits and [...]
Why did a witch scare break out in Salem? some theories
It’s part 4 of our Truth v. Myth series on the 1692 witch scare in Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony.
We’ve so far looked at reasons for Salem to be very much on edge by spring 1692, political and religious reasons that make this incident a little more comprehensible, but we’ve also tried to establish that the [...]
Did the Puritans believe in witchcraft?
Part 3 of our Truth v. Myth series on the Salem Witch trials asks this question: did the Puritans believe in witchcraft?
I will go out on a limb with an absolute statement to say that every discussion of Salem, no matter how scholarly, includes at some point the assertion that the Puritans believed in witches, [...]
The 1692 witch scare: why Salem?
Welcome to part 2 of my Truth v. Myth series on the Salem witch scare of 1692. Here we take a look at Salem before the scare to see what was happening, and why Salem ended up as the site of this tragedy.
Salem was not just any old town in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Salem [...]
Truth v. Myth: The Salem Witch Trials
Welcome to part one of my Truth v. Myth series on the Salem Witch Trials and the whole witch scare that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692. This is perhaps the most famous Puritan moment in American history, the one thing most people think of when they think of the New England [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Puritans v. Quakers in the battle for our sympathy
I just finished my Delbanco book and it strikes me that most historians who write about the Puritans just don’t like them, deep down inside, and this colors their history.
Of course, it’s not as if liking a group makes your history better than disliking a group. Ideally, you try to be as objective as possible.
But [...]
The Puritans and their ridiculous beliefs… in 1776
I’m reading The Puritan Ordeal by Andrew Delbanco, and while the book is focused on the Puritan religious beliefs in the 17th century, one can’t help reading it as a treatise on American political beliefs in the 18th century.
–The Puritans “impute all faults and corruptions, wherewith the world aboundeth, unto the kind of ecclesiastical government established.” [...]
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