The Puritan Ordeal

The Puritan Ordeal PDF

Author: Andrew Delbanco

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0674034171

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More than an ecclesiastical or political history, this book is a vivid description of the earliest American immigrant experience. It depicts the dramatic tale of the seventeenth-century newcomers to our shores as they were drawn and pushed to make their way in an unsettled and unsettling world.

The Gentle Puritan

The Gentle Puritan PDF

Author: Edmund S. Morgan

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0807839728

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Now available again, this important biography of the early New England intellectual leader was greeted as a "landmark in the history of the American mind" by Clifford K. Shipton when it appeared in 1962. Stiles lived at a critical time--the transition from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, which came suddenly in New England--and because of his position, his influence was great." Originally published in 1974. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order

Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order PDF

Author: Margo Todd

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-11-07

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780521892285

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The author contends that the traditional views of puritan social thought have done a great injustice to the intellectual history of the 16th-century. Margo Todd reveals the puritans to be the heirs to a complex intellectual legacy.

Writing New England

Writing New England PDF

Author: Andrew Delbanco

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 9780674006034

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From John Winthrop and Anne Bradstreet to Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Thoreau to Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Updike, this anthology provides a collective self-portrait of the New England mind from the Puritans to the present. 9 halftones.

From the Puritans to the Projects

From the Puritans to the Projects PDF

Author: Lawrence J. Vale

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 0674044576

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From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a comprehensive institutional history of public housing in Boston and a broader examination of the nature and extent of public obligation to house socially and economically marginal Americans during the past 350 years. First, Vale highlights startling continuities both in the way housing assistance has been delivered to the American poor and in the policies used to reward the nonpoor. He traces the stormy history of the Boston Housing Authority, a saga of entrenched patronage and virulent racism tempered, and partially overcome, by the efforts of unyielding reformers. He explores the birth of public housing as a program intended to reward the upwardly mobile working poor, details its painful transformation into a system designed to cope with society's least advantaged, and questions current policy efforts aimed at returning to a system of rewards for responsible members of the working class. The troubled story of Boston public housing exposes the mixed motives and ideological complexity that have long characterized housing in America, from the Puritans to the projects.

The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism

The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism PDF

Author: George McKenna

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 0300137672

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In this absorbing book, George McKenna ranges across the entire panorama of American history to track the development of American patriotism. That patriotism—shaped by Reformation Protestantism and imbued with the American Puritan belief in a providential “errand”—has evolved over 350 years and influenced American political culture in both positive and negative ways, McKenna shows. The germ of the patriotism, an activist theology that stressed collective rather than individual salvation, began in the late 1630s in New England and traveled across the continent, eventually becoming a national phenomenon. Today, American patriotism still reflects its origins in the seventeenth century. By encouraging cohesion in a nation of diverse peoples and inspiring social reform, American patriotism has sometimes been a force for good. But the book also uncovers a darker side of the nation’s patriotism—a prejudice against the South in the nineteenth century, for example, and a tendency toward nativism and anti-Catholicism. Ironically, a great reversal has occurred, and today the most fervent believers in the Puritan narrative are the former “outsiders”—Catholics and Southerners. McKenna offers an interesting new perspective on patriotism’s role throughout American history, and he concludes with trenchant thoughts on its role in the post-9/11 era.

The Puritan Experiment

The Puritan Experiment PDF

Author: Francis J. Bremer

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780874517286

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The comprehensive history of a system of faith that shaped the nation.

Buried Dreams

Buried Dreams PDF

Author: Andrew R. Black

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2020-10-14

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0807174092

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The Hoosac railroad tunnel in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts was a nineteenth-century engineering and construction marvel, on par with the Brooklyn Bridge, Transcontinental Railroad, and Erie Canal. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere at the time (4.75 miles), it took nearly twenty-five years (1851‒1875), almost two hundred casualties, and tens of millions of dollars to build. Yet it failed to deliver on its grandiose promise of economic renewal for the commonwealth, and thus is little known today. Andrew R. Black’s Buried Dreams refreshes public memory of the project, explaining how a plan of such magnitude and cost came to be in the first place, what forces sustained its completion, and the factors that inhibited its success. Black digs into the special case of Massachusetts, a state disadvantaged by nature and forced repeatedly to reinvent itself to succeed economically. The Hoosac Tunnel was just one of the state’s efforts in this cycle of decline and rejuvenation, though certainly the strangest. Black also explores the intense rivalry among Eastern Seaboard states for the spoils of western expansion in the post‒Erie Canal period. His study interweaves the lure of the West, the competition between Massachusetts and archrival New York, the railroad boom and collapse, and the shifting ground of state and national politics. The psychic makeup of Americans before and after the Civil War heavily influenced public perceptions of the tunnel; by the time it was finished, Black contends, the indomitable triumphalism that had given birth to the Hoosac had faded to skepticism and cynicism. Anticipated economic benefits never arrived, and Massachusetts eventually sold the tunnel for only a fraction of its cost to a private railroad company. Buried Dreams tells a story of America’s reckoning with the perils of impractical idealism, the limits of technology to bend nature to its will, and grand endeavors untempered by humility.

Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649

Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649 PDF

Author: Lori Rogers-Stokes

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-23

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 3030508455

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This book presents a revolutionary new reading of manuscript records left by puritan minister Thomas Shepard in Cambridge, Massachusetts that have been studied for decades as his on-the-spot recording of oral relations of faith delivered by candidates for church membership. This book proves that these records are not relations, but Shepard’s personal record of sessions of trial—meetings with candidates still working out their spiritual seeking. New transcriptions of the original manuscript records, and corresponding never-before-published writing by Shepard, dispel much of the confusion produced by the published transcriptions. Close-readings of the manuscripts, contrasted with the published transcriptions, set the stage for a new understanding of puritan spiritual preparation in Shepard’s Cambridge church. The book concludes with a challenge to the negative reading of the women’s records that is central to established scholarship, revealing their powerful, confident spiritual identities and voices.

A History of American Puritan Literature

A History of American Puritan Literature PDF

Author: Kristina Bross

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 668

ISBN-13: 1108879713

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For generations, scholars have imagined American puritans as religious enthusiasts, fleeing persecution, finding refuge in Massachusetts, and founding 'America'. The puritans have been read as a product of New England and the origin of American exceptionalism. This History challenges the usual understanding of American puritans, offering new ways of reading their history and their literary culture. Together, an international team of authors make clear that puritan America cannot be thought of apart from Native America, and that its literature is also grounded in Britain, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and networks that spanned the globe. Each chapter focuses on a single place, method, idea, or context to read familiar texts anew and to introduce forgotten or neglected voices and writings. A History of American Puritan Literature is a collaborative effort to create not a singular literary history, but a series of interlocked new histories of American puritan literature.