New England Nation

New England Nation PDF

Author: B. Daniels

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-09-06

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1137025638

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Out of European revolutions and social upheaval, an extraordinary society of literate, pious, and prosperous English Puritans flowered in seventeenth-century New England. This wonderfully readable history recreates the world of Puritan New England and places it in the broad sweep of history. The book provides a fascinating look into Puritan society, with sailors, sinners, women, children, and Native Americans joining the usual Puritan ministers of the seventeenth century. Combining remarkable primary sources with an enjoyable narrative, this book reveals the New England Nation in its fullness and complexity, and reveals striking parallels with the America of today.

A Reforming People

A Reforming People PDF

Author: David D. Hall

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 080787311X

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In this revelatory account of the people who founded the New England colonies, historian David D. Hall compares the reforms they enacted with those attempted in England during the period of the English Revolution. Bringing with them a deep fear of arbitrary, unlimited authority, these settlers based their churches on the participation of laypeople and insisted on "consent" as a premise of all civil governance. Puritans also transformed civil and criminal law and the workings of courts with the intention of establishing equity. In this political and social history of the five New England colonies, Hall provides a masterful re-evaluation of the earliest moments of New England's history, revealing the colonists to be the most effective and daring reformers of their day.