Saints and strangers
Subtitle: New England in British North America
By: Joseph A. Conforti.
Series: Regional perspectives on early America
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 236
Subjects: Puritans -- New England -- History; New England -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
Description: In the first general history of colonial New England to be published in over twenty-five years, Joseph A. Conforti synthesizes current and classic scholarship to explore how Puritan saints and "strangers" to Puritanism participated in the making of colonial New England. Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop's famous description of New England as a "city upon a hill" has tended to reduce the region's history to an exclusively Pilgrim-Puritan drama, a world of narrow-minded founders, the First Thanksgiving, steepled churches, and the Salem witchcraft trials. Conforti shows that New England was neither as Puritan nor as insular as most familiar stories imply. As the region evolved into British America's preeminent maritime region, the Atlantic Ocean served as a highway of commercial and cultural encounter, connecting white English settlers to different races and religious communities of the transatlantic world.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: City upon a hill; title: Native New England : from precontact to colonial beginnings; title: Puritan New England, 1620-1660; title: Beyond Puritan New England : profane, maritime and dissenting borderlands; title: New England besieged, 1660-1700; title: Saints and strangers in the eighteenth century; title: Provincial New England : the eighteenth-century empire of liberty, commerce, and Protestantism; title: From the city upon a hill to Plymouth Rock.