Volume 36, Number 17 · November 9, 1989
Struggle Over the Puritans
By Gordon S. Wood
The Puritan Ordeal
by Andrew Delbanco
Harvard University Press, 306 pp., $30.00
To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism
by Theodore Dwight Bozeman
University of North Carolina Press, 413 pp., $34.95
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England
by David D. Hall
Knopf, 316 pp., $29.95
Though it is today hard to imagine, there was a moment when historians regarded the seventeenth-century Puritans as having virtually no significance for the development of America. During the first quarter of the twentieth century the Progressive scholars and historians who then dominated American colonial studies, such as Vernon Parrington and James T. Adams, denied the Puritans any part in the making of what was rightly American. The liberal democratic future of America, these historians contended, actually belonged to all those religious dissidents and victims of Puritan persecution—from Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who were banished from Massachusetts Bay to Rhode Island, to those stubborn Quakers hanged on Boston Common.
Review, 6651 words
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