Perry Miller was born in Chicago on February 25, 1905. He was educated at the University of Chicago where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1931. Since then Mr. Miller taught at Harvard University and in 1946 became a Professor of American Literature there. He died in 1963. He was the author of Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (1933); The New England Mind (1939); Jonathan Edwards (1949); Roger Williams (1953); The Raven and the Whale (1956); and Errand into the Wilderness (1956). This anthology is organized as follows: Foreword Chapter One. History 1. William Bradford, 1590-1657 Of Plymouth Plantation 2. Thomas Shepard, 1605-1649 A Defense of the Answer 3. Edward Johnson, 1598-1672 Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Savior 4. John Winthrop, 1588-1649 Journal 5. John Winthrop, 1588-1649 The Antinomian Crisis 6. Cotton Mather, 1663-1728 A General Introduction Chapter Two. State and Society 1. John Winthrop, 1588-1649 A Model of Christian Charity 2. John Cotton, 1584-1652 Limitation of Government 3. Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647 Hartford Election Sermon 4. John Winthrop, 1588-1649 Speech to the General Court 5. Nathaniel Ward, 1578-1652 The Simple Cobler of Aggawam 6. Jonathan Mitchell, 1624-1668 Nehemiah on the Wall 7. William Stoughton, 1631-1701 New England’s True Interest 8. William Hubbard, 1621-1704 The Happiness of a People 9. John Wise, 1652-1725 Vindication of the Government of New England Churches 10. Jonathan Mayhew, 1720-1766 A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission Chapter Three. This World and the Next 1. Thomas Shepard, 1605-1649 The Covenant of Grace 2. Peter Bulkeley, 1583-1659 The Lesson of the Covenant, for England and New England 3. Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647 A True Sight of Sin 4. Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647 Repentant Sinners and Their Ministers 5. John Cotton, 1584-1652 Christian Calling 6. Increase Mather, 1639-1723 Man Knows Not His Time 7. Urian Oakes, 1631-1681 The Sovereign Efficacy of Divine Providence 8. Samuel Sewall, 1652-1730 Phaenomena 9. Cotton Mather, 1663-1728 Bonifacius 10. Solomon Stoddard, 1643-1729 Concerning Ancestors Chapter Four. Personal Narrative 1. Thomas Shepard, 1605-1649 Autobiography 2. Increase Mather, 1639-1723 Richard Mather 3. Samuel Sewall, 1652-1730 Diary 4. John Williams, 1664-1729 The Redeemed Captive Chapter Five. Poetry 1. Anne Bradstreet, 1612-1672 Several Poems 2. Anne Bradstreet, 1612-1672 Meditations 3. Michael Wigglesworth, 1631-1705 The Day of Doom 4. Michael Wigglesworth, 1631-1705 God’s Controversy With New England 5. E.B. A Threnodia 6. Edward Taylor, 1645?-1729 God’s Determinations Touching His Elect 7. Edward Taylor, 1645?-1729 Poems and Sacramental Meditations Chapter Six. Literary and Educational Ideals 1. Richard Mather, 1596-1669 The Bay Psalm Book 2. New England’s First Fruits New England’s First Fruits 3. Michael Wigglesworth, 1631-1705 The Praise of Eloquence 4. Cotton Mather, 1663-1728 Of Style

In The American Puritans , Dustin Benge and Nate Pickowicz tell the story of the first hundred years of Reformed Protestantism in New England through the lives of nine key figures: William Bradford, John Winthrop, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepard, Anne Bradstreet, John Eliot, Samuel Willard, and Cotton Mather. Here is sympathetic yet informed history, a book that corrects many myths and half-truths told about the American Puritans while inspiring a current generation of Christians to let their light shine before men. Table of Contents: Introduction: Who Are the American Puritans? 1. William Bradford 2. John Winthrop 3. John Cotton 4. Thomas Hooker 5. Thomas Shepard 6. Anne Bradstreet 7. John Eliot 8. Samuel Willard 9. Cotton Mather

Mary White Rowlandwon, a New England Congregationalist minister's wife, was held captive by the Algonquin Indians during King Philip's War in 1676. Several years after she was ransomed and living among the British again she wrote a narrative of the captivity chronicling her experience in grief, love, resentment, and ethnic trauma. Breitwieser argues that this narrative undercuts the Puritan values Rowlandson attempted to uphold. He reveals where and how Rowlandson breaks with Puritan conventions. He points out that in American Puritan religious practice, real experiences were seen as siogns or emblems of moral abstractions. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning will be essential reading for all who study early American literature and culture.

Over the last two decades a major revaluation has been taking place of the colonial Puritan imagination. With the growth of interest in early American literature has come increasing recognition of its quality and a better understanding of its place in the continuity of American culture. However, much of the best critical work to date has been published as articles in scholarly journals, and in bringing together for the first time the best work in this growing field the present anthology fills a number of important needs. It is at once a valuabale and accessible introduction for students, a summing-up of a new enterprise, and a guide for further studies.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Puritan Poetics and the American Tradition is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

The whole destiny of America is contained in the first Puritans who landed on these shores, wrote de Tocqueville. These newcomers, and the range of their intellectual achievements and failures, are vividly depicted in The Puritans in America. Exiled from England, the Puritans settled in what Cromwell called “a poor, cold, and useless” place—where they created a body of ideas and aspirations that were essential in the shaping of American religion, politics, and culture. In a felicitous blend of documents and narrative Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco recapture the sweep and restless change of Puritan thought from its incipient Americanism through its dominance in New England society to its fragmentation in the face of dissent from within and without. A general introduction sketches the Puritan environment, and shorter introductions open each of the six sections of the collection. Thirty-eight writers are included—among these Cotton, Bradford, Bradstreet, Winthrop, Rowlandson, Taylor, and the Mathers—as well as the testimony of Anne Hutchinson and documents illustrating the witchcraft crisis. The works, several of which are published here for the first time since the seventeenth century, are presented in modern spelling and punctuation. Despite numerous scholarly probings, Puritanism remains resistant to categories, whether those of Perry Miller, Max Weber, or Christopher Hill. This new anthology—the first major interpretive collection in nearly fifty years—reveals the beauty and power of Puritan literature as it emerged from the pursuit of self-knowledge in the New World.

In this absorbing book, George McKenna ranges across the entire panorama of American history to track the development of American patriotism. That patriotism--shaped by Reformation Protestantism and imbued with the American Puritan belief in a providential "errand"--has evolved over 350 years and influenced American political culture in both positive and negative ways, McKenna shows. The germ of the patriotism, an activist theology that stressed collective rather than individual salvation, began in the late 1630s in New England and traveled across the continent, eventually becoming a national phenomenon. Today, American patriotism still reflects its origins in the seventeenth century. By encouraging cohesion in a nation of diverse peoples and inspiring social reform, American patriotism has sometimes been a force for good. But the book also uncovers a darker side of the nation's patriotism--a prejudice against the South in the nineteenth century, for example, and a tendency toward nativism and anti-Catholicism. Ironically, a great reversal has occurred, and today the most fervent believers in the Puritan narrative are the former "outsiders"--Catholics and Southerners. McKenna offers an interesting new perspective on patriotism's role throughout American history, and he concludes with trenchant thoughts on its role in the post-9/11 era.

Jeffrey Hammond's study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief. The elegies emerge, he argues not as 'poems' to be read and appreciated in a post-romantic sense, but as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience of loss in accordance with theological expectation. Read in the framework of their own time and place, the elegies shed light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture. Hammond's book reassesses a body of poems whose importance on their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. It represents the first full-length study of its kind in English.

An original interpretation of 'the people's two bodies' that illuminates the opposite attitudes toward compromise throughout the American founding.

The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature offers students a literary history of American writing in English between 1492 and 1820, as well as providing a concise social and cultural history of these three centuries. Emory Elliott traces the impact of race, gender, and ethnic conflict on early American culture, and explores the centrality of American Puritanism in the formation of a distinctively American literature. This highly engaging and comprehensive study will be essential reading for students of the literature, history and culture of early America.