Congregationalists, the oldest group of American Protestants, are the heirs of New England's first founders. While they were key characters in the story of early American history, from Plymouth Rock and the founding of Harvard and Yale to the Revolutionary War, their luster and numbers have faded. But Margaret Bendroth's critical history of Congregationalism over the past two centuries reveals how the denomination is essential for understanding mainline Protestantism in the making. Bendroth chronicles how the New England Puritans, known for their moral and doctrinal rigor, came to be the antecedents of the United Church of Christ, one of the most liberal of all Protestant denominations today. The demands of competition in the American religious marketplace spurred Congregationalists, Bendroth argues, to face their distinctive history. By engaging deeply with their denomination's storied past, they recast their modern identity. The soul-searching took diverse forms--from letter writing and eloquent sermonizing to Pilgrim-celebrating Thanksgiving pageants--as Congregationalists renegotiated old obligations to their seventeenth-century spiritual ancestors. The result was a modern piety that stood a respectful but ironic distance from the past and made a crucial contribution to the American ethos of religious tolerance.

"Shedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan belief and practice in England, Scotland, and New England, Hall provides a multifaceted account of a cultural movement that judged the Protestant reforms of Elizabeth's reign to be unfinished"--Provided by publisher.

Examines the sins and confessions in church disciplinary records to argue that daily practices created a gendered Puritanism.

To her neighbours in the small Cotswold town of Tilsbury she is a respectable wife and mother; to her husband Josiah she will always be his 'Doll', the child-bride he brought home from the German wars; to the painter of the family's portrait she is an enigma, remote and unknowable, a mystery perhaps even to herself. When Royalist soldiers arrive to garrison Tilsbury the tranquil rhythm of country life is shattered. Mistress Doll Taverner is more affected than anyone by the impact of the Civil War, which revives all the half-forgotten nightmares of childhood tragedy. Then a Cornish officer, Captain Stephen Sutton, begins to pose a threat of a subtler kind; as affection grows between them, she is compelled to question all the certainties by which she has lived her life.