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A group of Pilgrims in prayer.

How the Pilgrims Redefined What It Means to Move Across the World

The Puritan origins of modern ideas about migration.
by Yoni Appelbaum via Literary Hub on February 19, 2025
A painting of a group of Puritans walking through a snowy forest, with the men carrying rifles.

The Puritans Were Book Banners, But They Weren’t Sexless Sourpusses

From early New England to the present day, censors have acted out of fear, not prudishness.
by Peter C. Mancall via Zócalo Public Square on November 25, 2024

A Modest Proposal

More importantly, our misappropriation of “puritan” has allowed scholars to ignore and the public to misunderstand religion.
by Carla Gardina Pestana via Commonplace on May 21, 2024
Another text is visible beneath a ripped piece of writing

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 they were building in colonial New England.
by Colleen Connolly via Smithsonian on October 2, 2023
Republican debate.

What the Republican Debates Get Wrong About the Puritans

Pence invoked them at the Republican debates, but a true reckoning with their history provides a different vision of the nation’s future.
by Peter C. Mancall via Zócalo Public Square on September 27, 2023
Detail of a five-shilling Massachusetts Colony note, the only surviving piece of the colony’s 1690 legal tender.

‘Easy Money’ Review: The Currency and the Commonwealth

Saddled with debt and forbidden by the crown to mint money, Boston’s Puritans dreamed up a novel monetary system that we still use today.
by Adam Rowe via The Wall Street Journal on March 31, 2023
John Winthrop.

When Perry Miller Invented America

In a covenantal nation like the United States, words are the very ligaments that hold the body together, and what words we choose become everything.
by Ed Simon via Los Angeles Review of Books on February 5, 2023
Painting of pilgrims on a boat embarking towards the New World

One Manner of Law

The religious origins of American liberalism.
by Marilynne Robinson via Harper’s on July 1, 2022
Painting of a Puritan family sitting around a table with books.

Read More Puritan Poetry

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.
by Ed Simon via The Millions on February 4, 2022
Embarkation of the Pilgrims.

Puritanism as a State of Mind

Whatever the “City on a Hill” is, the phrase was not discovered by Kennedy or Reagan.
by Glen A. Moots via Law & Liberty on April 30, 2021
Illustration of Thomas Morton of Merrymount being arrested by Myles Standish of the Plymouth Colony

Pranksters and Puritans

Why Thomas Morton seems to have taken particular delight in driving the Pilgrims and Puritans out of their minds.
by Christopher Benfey via New York Review of Books on February 15, 2021
Drawing of pilgrims walking in a line in the snow.

Why the Puritans Cracked Down on Celebrating Christmas

It was less about their asceticism and more about rejecting the world they had fled.
by Peter C. Mancall via The Conversation on December 17, 2020

The Puritans Are Alright

A review of "Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America."
by Ed Simon via Los Angeles Review of Books on December 16, 2020
Erie Canal historical marker

The ‘Psychic Highway’ that Carried the Puritans’ Social Crusade Westward

Elements of the Puritans’ unique worldview were handed down for generations and were carried westward by their descendants, the people we call Yankees.
by Gregory Rodriguez via Contra Mundum on November 22, 2020
Map of Boston from 1722.

This "Miserable African": Race, Crime, and Disease in Colonial Boston

The murder that challenged Cotton Mather’s complex views about race, slavery, and Christianity.
by Mark S. Weiner via Commonplace on July 13, 2020

How America Became “A City Upon a Hill”

The rise and fall of Perry Miller.
by Abram C. Van Engen via Humanities on January 2, 2020
Drawing of Puritans.

How Should We Remember the Puritans?

In his new book, Daniel Rodgers not only offers a close reading of Puritan history but also seeks to rescue their early critique of market economy.
by Andrew Delbanco via The Nation on November 18, 2019

Winthrop’s “City” Was Exceptional, not Exceptionalist

A review of Daniel T. Rodgers’ "As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon."
by Jim Sleeper via Los Angeles Review of Books on February 19, 2019
Puritans drinking in a colonial pub.

Perry Miller and the Puritans: An Introduction

Historians often treat Miller as a foil, but the Father of American Intellectual history retains untapped potential to inspire new modes of inquiry.
by Rivka Maizlish via U.S. Intellectual History Blog on May 8, 2013

Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates: The Problem With Popularization

Making history more appealing to the public may come at a cost.
by Kathryn Lofton via Religion Dispatches on June 17, 2009
John Harvard statue by Daniel Chester French.

Reading Puritans and the Bard

Without the bawdy world of Falstaff and Prince Hal and of Shakespeare’s jesters, there would have been nothing for those dissenting Puritans to dissent from.
by Mark A. Peterson via Commonplace on October 1, 2006
View of Boston in 1730.

Civil Unions in the City on a Hill: The Real Legacy of "Boston Judges"

For the English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite.
by Mark A. Peterson via Commonplace on April 2, 2004
Haitan commuinty members bowing their heads in prayer.

The Coming Witch Trials

It’s time to care for the community—not cleanse it.
by Adam Jortner via Current (religion and democracy) on October 22, 2024
Cover of American Scary by Jeremy Dauber.

The Historical Seeds of Horror in "American Scary"

Jeremy Dauber's new book explores the themes and origins of the American horror genre.
by Gianni Washington via Chicago Review Of Books on October 7, 2024
A couple in bed together, separated by a divider and watched by the girl's parents.

Bundling: An Old Tradition on New Ground

Common in colonial New England, bundling allowed a suitor to spend a night in bed with his sweetheart—while her parents slept in the next room.
by Richard Godbeer, Amelia Soth via JSTOR Daily on February 29, 2024
An English revolutionary takes the crown off of the head of the dead King Charles I.

What Happens When You Kill Your King

After the English Revolution—and an island’s experiment with republicanism—a genuine restoration was never in the cards.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on April 17, 2023
"Sinners In The Hands of an Angry God" title page.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: Annotated

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.
by Ed Simon via JSTOR Daily on February 20, 2023
An illustration of Puritans in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The Witches of Springfield

Before Salem, this small town succumbed to the witch-hunting fever.
by Katrina Gulliver via Law & Liberty on December 16, 2022
A lithograph depicting the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s 'The Meritous Price of Our Redemption' by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy.

He Wasn’t Like the Other New England “Witches.” His Story Explains a Lot.

The little-told tale of the 1651 trial of Hugh and Mary Parsons.
by Colin Dickey via Slate on October 31, 2022
Pastoral landscape with classical architecture. Copy after Thomas Cole’s “Dream of Arcadia”, by Robert Seldon Duncanson, 1852.

An Ugly Preeminence

On the devout abolitionists who excoriated American exceptionalism.
by Ian Tyrrell via Lapham’s Quarterly on January 26, 2022
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