Saints and strangers

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.

First Sentence

"COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND" evokes some of the most familiar, even notorious, images in American history and mythology.

Subjects

Series Statement

• Regional perspectives on early America

Other Editions

• Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (Regional Perspectives on Early America)HardcoverThe Johns Hopkins University Press2005-12-05
• Saints and strangersJohns Hopkins University Press2006
• Saints and StrangersPaperbackThe Johns Hopkins University Press2005-12-05