John Bunyan is known principally as the author of the famous inspirational allegory, The Pilgrim's Progress. What has carried his fame, however, as much as his art, has been the attraction his work and life have held for the English evangelical tradition. Bunyan was a part of the Puritan movement, which took it for granted that a person would suffer for all things he believed were right. They gave England an ideal of the good man--honest, brave, God-fearing, hard-working and dutiful. Bunyan was a rural tinker when he experienced his "conversion." He became an outspoken traveling Nonconformist preacher who encouraged dissenters against the Stuart effort toward religious uniformity. As an important theorist and spokesman for the rebels, Bunyan was threatened with exile. He chose prison instead, rather than compromise his moral convictions. There, during his long confinement, he wrote numerous tracts and stories, including The Pilgrim's Progress. Here, biographer Monica Furlong examines the major tenets of Puritanism as they were developed and fought for by its chief practitioner and preacher.--From publisher description.

From the time of the stern (but were they so stern?) Puritans to the time of the post-war flapper, American life - that is, the actual everyday habits, beliefs, superstitions, recreations, and ambitions of plain, sometimes honest and formerly God-fearing Americans - has rapidly and repeatedly changed. Each decade and era has been different, and picturesquely different. The author has wittily, shrewdly, and brilliantly evoked these former American ways and their influence (if any) upon the Americans of 1931. This book is a continuous flow of facts and anecdotes, retrieved from all sorts of out-of-the-way material, from records of Mr. Train's family, from many years of reading. There are many chuckles in the book, and much surprising information. Here the author tells how Americans have lived from generation to generation, how these generations have differed from, or resembled, each other.--Provided by publisher.

History is dramatic—and the renowned, award-winning authors Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier demonstrate this in a compelling series aimed at young readers. Covering American history from the founding of Jamestown through present day, these volumes explore far beyond the dates and events of a historical chronicle to present a moving illumination of the ideas, opinions, attitudes, and tribulations that led to the birth of this great nation. In Pilgrims and Puritans, the authors begin in the year 1620 in England and end in New England in the year 1676. The book recounts the religious, political, and social history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its influence on our lives today. The narrative follows various groups of settlers from their departure from England through arrival in the New World and their often violent conflicts with the native peoples of the Americas. The authors examine a number of issues that arose in the new society that was founded and the rise and fall of the "city on a hill."

Through a detailed account of the genesis, flowering, and decline of the Puritan ideal of a church of the elect in England and America, Morgan offers an important reinterpretation of a pivotal era in New England history. Historians have generally supposed that the main outlines of the Puritan church were determined in England and Holland and transplanted to the new world. Morgan convincingly suggests that the distinguishing characteristic of the New England churches, the ideal of a church composed exclusively of true and tested saints, developed fully only in the 1630's and 1640's, some time after the first settlers arrived in New England. He also examines the influence of the Separatist colony at Plymouth on the later settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and follows the difficulties created by a definition of the religious community so selective that the New England churches nearly expired for lack of saints to fill them--From publisher description.

"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.