First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World

Sources and Further Readings

sources and Further readinGs A good starting place to understand puritanism and its impact on England and America is Francis J. Bremer, Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: oxford University Press, 2010). Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995) in many ways complements First Founders. That earlier work is a narrative overview of New England history that brings the story down to the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. There is still value in samuel Eliot Morison’s Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1930), a collection of biographical sketches of various puritans, which was the inspiration for this work. david d. Hall has written with great insight into the seventeenth-century New England world. Highly recommended are Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York: Knopf, 2011). stephen Foster’s The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) offers an important discussion of its subject. There is still much value to be derived from Cotton Mather’s 1702 work, Magnalia Christi Americana. Mather, the son of Increase Mather, had available to him numerous sources that have since disappeared. His closeness to the subject makes his judgments suspect, but he recorded details of the lives of the early puritans which can be found nowhere else. In writing this book I have turned frequently to John G. Palfrey’s five-volume History of New England to the Revolutionary War (1859–1890). Like Mather, the judgments have been surpassed by subsequent scholarship, but the level of detail and the inclusion of documents in the notes make it a valuable source. John Winthrop and the Struggle to Lead a Godly Life Quotes in this chapter are taken from The Winthrop Papers, five volumes to date (Boston, 1929–). The Massachusetts Historical society plans to put these volumes as well as a new volume of Religious Writings and future volumes online on their website (masshist.org). richard s. dunn, James savage, and Laetitia 274 Sources and Further Readings Yaendle, eds., The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) is the definitive edition of Winthrop ’s account of the public events of his time in the colony. Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York, oxford University Press, 2003) is the most recent full-length biography of John Winthrop. still valuable are the insights in Edmund s. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958). John Endecott: Godly Magistrate The only biography of Endecott is Lawrence shaw Mayo, John Endecott (Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). The Pequot War and Endecott’s role in it are explored in Alfred Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). His role in cutting the cross of st. George from the English ensign is the focus of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Endicott and the red Cross.” Accounts of the early trials of the settlers can be found in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629–1638 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976). The quote from stephen Foster is from his The Long Argument. The court cases are to be found in George Francis dow, ed., Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts: 1662–1667, which is available in modern reprints. John Wilson: Puritan Pastor despite his importance as minister of the Boston church from its founding until his death in 1667, there has been no scholarly study of Wilson. Alexander W. M’Clure’s The Lives of John Wilson, John Norton, and John Davenport (1846) draws much of its information from Mather’s Magnalia. A valuable source is richard d. Pierce, ed., The Records of the First Church in Boston, 1630–1868 (Boston , The Colonial society of Boston, 1961). The account of Wilson’s speech to the troops is in Edward Johnson, Wonder Working Providence (1653), which is available in reprints. Thomas Dudley and Thomas Shepard: Hammers of Heretics There has been no scholarly study of Thomas dudley. He is an important figure, however, in Bremer, John Winthrop, in Michael Winship’s studies of the Free Grace Controversy noted in the suggestions...