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.

Excerpt from Memoir of the Rev. Nathaniel Ward, A. M: Author of the Simple Cobbler of Agawam in America, With Notices of His Family The writer of this memoir has long felt a strong desire to know more of the history of the Rev. Nathaniel Ward than could be learned from the brief sketches of his life that, from time to time, have appeared in periodicals and other works. This learned divine was one of the earliest of our American authors; and his merits as a writer, as well as his services in compiling the early laws of Massachusetts, have made his name familiar to the readers of New England history. But the facts related concerning him in the fullest of those sketches, were found to be scanty and unsatisfactory; and, many years ago, the writer began to collect such notices of Mr. Ward's life and writings, as fell in his way in the course of his reading. The present biography has been compiled from materials gleaned from various and scattered sources. It is not so full in its details as the writer would like, and probably not so full as some subsequent investigator may make it; yet he has been quite as successful in obtaining materials as he hoped for when he began his labors. The appendix, besides other matters, contains biographic sketches of Mr. Ward's two brothers, and of his oldest son. These sketches are believed to be more full than any previously published. The will of Mr. Ward's father is curious and interesting. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.