Search results
The area today is the U.S. state of Rhode Island. June 22 – The Battle of Tornavento is fought in north-west Italy in the course of the Thirty Years' War, as France and Savoy respond to an attack by Spain. While the battle is a stalemate, the city of Castano Primo is heavily damaged. July–September
Oct 2, 2023 · History of Now. How America’s First Banned Book Survived and Became an Anti-Authoritarian Icon. The Puritans outlawed Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan” because it was critical of the society...
- Colleen Connolly
People also ask
What happened in 1630?
What happened between 1626 and 1650?
What events happened during the First World War?
What happened in Persia in 1631?
- Overview
- A new England for Puritans
- Plymouth: the first Puritan colony
- The Puritan work ethic
- What do you think?
Puritans facing religious persecution in England set out for the New World, where they established a colony at Plymouth.
The second major area to be colonized by the English in the first half of the 17th century, New England, differed markedly in its founding principles from the commercially oriented Chesapeake tobacco colonies.
Settled largely by waves of Puritan families in the 1630s, New England had a religious orientation from the start. In England, reform-minded men and women had been calling for greater changes to the English national church since the 1580s. These reformers, who followed the teachings of John Calvin and other Protestant reformers, were called Puritans because of their insistence on purifying the Church of England of what they believed to be unscriptural, Catholic elements that lingered in its institutions and practices.
Many who provided leadership in early New England were educated ministers who had studied at Cambridge or Oxford but who, because they had questioned the practices of the Church of England, had been deprived of careers by the king and his officials in an effort to silence all dissenting voices.
Other Puritan leaders, such as the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, came from the privileged class of English gentry. These well-to-do Puritans and many thousands more left their English homes not to establish a land of religious freedom, but to practice their own religion without persecution. Puritan New England offered them the opportunity to live as they believed the Bible demanded. In their “New” England, they set out to create a model of reformed Protestantism, a new English Israel.
The conflict generated by Puritanism had divided English society because the Puritans demanded reforms that undermined the traditional festive culture. For example, they denounced popular pastimes like bear-baiting—letting dogs attack a chained bear—which were often conducted on Sundays when people had a few leisure hours. In the culture where William Shakespeare had produced his masterpieces, Puritans called for an end to the theater, censuring playhouses as places of decadence.
Indeed, the Bible itself became part of the struggle between Puritans and James I, who as King of England was head of the Church of England. Soon after ascending the throne, James commissioned a new version of the Bible in an effort to stifle Puritan reliance on the Geneva Bible, which followed the teachings of John Calvin and placed God’s authority above the monarch’s. The King James Version, published in 1611, instead emphasized the majesty of kings.
The first group of Puritans to make their way across the Atlantic was a small contingent known as the Pilgrims. Unlike other Puritans, they insisted on a complete separation from the Church of England and had first migrated to the Dutch Republic seeking religious freedom.
Although they found they could worship without hindrance there, they grew concerned that they were losing their Englishness as they saw their children begin to learn the Dutch language and adopt Dutch ways. In addition, the English Pilgrims—and others in Europe—feared another attack on the Dutch Republic by Catholic Spain. Because of this, in 1620 they moved on to found the Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts.
The governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, was a Separatist—a proponent of complete separation from the English state church. Bradford and the other Pilgrim Separatists represented a major challenge to the prevailing vision of a unified English national church and empire. On board the Mayflower, which was bound for Virginia but landed on the tip of Cape Cod, Bradford and 40 other adult men signed the Mayflower Compact, which presented a religious—rather than an economic—rationale for colonization. The compact expressed a community ideal of working together.
[Read the text of the Mayflower Compact]
Different labor systems also distinguished early Puritan New England from the Chesapeake colonies.
Puritans expected young people to work diligently at their calling, and all members of their large families—including children—did the bulk of the work necessary to run homes, farms, and businesses.
Unlike the indentured servants in Virginia, very few migrants came to New England as laborers; in fact, New England towns protected their disciplined homegrown workforce by refusing to allow outsiders in, ensuring their sons and daughters would have steady employment.
New England’s labor system produced remarkable results, notably a powerful maritime-based economy with scores of oceangoing ships and the crews necessary to sail them. New England mariners sailing New England-made ships transported Virginian tobacco and West Indian sugar throughout the Atlantic World.
How did the labor system of New England compare to the labor system of Virginia and the Chesapeake?
Read the Mayflower Compact. What aspects of later American political values do you see in it?
How do you think English citizens who belonged to the Church of England viewed the Puritans?
[Notes and attributions]
Nov 24, 2020 · Updated on November 24, 2020. Between 1626 and 1650, the new American colonies chafed at being so close to political rivals, and squabbled with one another over borders, religious freedom, and self-government. The key events during this time include the ongoing wars with Indigenous residents and disputes with the government of Charles I of England.
Jul 3 Emperor Ferdinand II opens German Parliament. Jul 6 Swedish troops under Gustaf II Adolf land at Peenemunde. Jul 12 New Amsterdam's governor buys Gull Island from Indians for cargo, renames it Oyster Island, later known as Ellis Island. Jul 18 Spanish troops occupy Mantua.
Nov 9, 2009 · Anne was born in 1591 in Lincolnshire, England. Her father, Francis Marbury, was a Puritan minister who insisted his daughter learn to read. In 1578, Marbury was tried for heresy by the church ...
sakoku, a Japanese policy consisting of a series of directives implemented over several years during the Edo period (also known as the Tokugawa period; 1603–1867) that enforced self-isolation from foreign powers in the early 17th century.
