After living in, while restoring, an old farmhouse built in the late 17th century or very early in the 18th, it was impossible for me not to want to know the history of the house and the people who lived there. Combine that with the stories my grandmother told me about our ancestor, the suspected witch Mary Bliss Parsons of Northampton, and I felt destined to know her story. That led to many years of research and writing. At the moment I am writing another 17th century New England historical fiction. I love this period of history and so few write about it.
Mary Dyer is a forgotten American hero, who suffered unbelievably for her faith. In early Boston Quakers, Baptists, Jews, Catholics—everyone but the Puritans—were banished. She became a Quaker missionary and led what became a hopeless cause: freedom of worship. Her whole story is painful, shocking, and cannot be summed up here without spoilers. The Puritan men who settled the Bay Colony hated and feared women who spoke up. They banished or destroyed them.
This is the story of Mary Dyer whose indomitable efforts to seek and find “freedom to worship” lead eventually to her death. Her quest began when she and her husband sailed from old to new England in 1635. Landing in Boston, they were soon disillusioned by the intolerant practices and beliefs of the Puritans, who considered that all truth could be found in the Old Testament—and only there. Variations, from Puritan interpretations of the Ten Commandments, were punished by cruel torture and/or death. Banished from Boston for protesting such rigidity in belief and in practice, Mary was among the group…
I am a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard. My personal experience of burnout, when I was a psychologist on a medical team in a hospital setting, led me to specialize in burnout in my private therapy practice. I’ve been doing therapy with adults experiencing chronic stress and burnout for many years since. I’ve also interviewed thought leaders in mental health on my podcast, Psychologists Off the Clock. I understand the complexity of burnout and the reason “quick fixes,” like individual wellness interventions, are often not enough to help with burnout. To really solve the problem, we must “dig deeper” and find both personal and cultural solutions.
I never realized how much I was overvaluing work and productivity until I read this book. I have been very good at achieving, hustling, and grinding, and have bought into the belief that hard work is a moral virtue, unlike laziness. I believed that being unproductive was fine for other people but not for me.
This book helped me see how my culturally constructed beliefs were feeding into my overworking tendencies. As a lifelong “people pleaser” in recovery, Chapter 6 (“Your Relationships Should Not Leave You Exhausted”) was especially powerful for me!
From social psychologist Dr. Devon Price, a conversational, stirring call to "a better, more human way to live" (Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author) that examines the "laziness lie"-which falsely tells us we are not working or learning hard enough.
Extra-curricular activities. Honors classes. 60-hour work weeks. Side hustles.
Like many Americans, Dr. Devon Price believed that productivity was the best way to measure self-worth. Price was an overachiever from the start, graduating from both college and graduate school early, but that success came at a cost. After Price was diagnosed with a severe case of anemia and heart…
Jenny Hale Pulsipher is a professor of history at Brigham Young University and the author of numerous articles and two award-winning books, Subjects unto theSame King: Indians, English, and the Contest of Authority in Early New England and Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England.
Hall's biography of one of the most influential Puritans in colonial New England offers a rich reading experience. Mather had a finger in everything, and seeing New England through his eyes helps the reader make sense of the political and religious factions, doctrinal struggles, the relationship between lay people and ministers (always less conservative than their followers), and the sweetness and suffering inherent in family life.
Powerful preacher, political negotiator for New England in the halls of Parliament, president of Harvard, father of Cotton Mather, Increase Mather was the epitome of the American Puritan. He was the most important spokesman of his generation for Congregationalism and became the last American Puritan of consequence as the seventeenth century ended. The story begins in 1639 when Mather was born in the Massachusetts village of Dorchester. He left home for Harvard College when he was twelve and at twenty-two began to stir the city of Boston from the pulpit of North Church. He had written four books by the…
I’m an economist, now in my fiftieth year as a professor at Harvard. While much of my work has focused on economic policy – questions like the effects of government budget deficits, guidelines for the conduct of U.S. monetary policy, and what actions to take in response to a banking or more general financial crisis – in recent years I’ve also addressed broader issues surrounding the connections between economics and society. Several years ago, in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, I examined the implications of our economy’s growth, or stagnation, for the social, political, and ultimately moral character of our society. My most recent book explores the connections between economic thinking and religious thinking.
Everyone knows that the Puritans settled in Boston and the Quakers settled in Philadelphia. What I found surprising is Baltzell’s argument that the two cities’ founding religions shaped their respective character for hundreds of years afterward. And, he says, the difference between Puritanism and Quakerism explains why Boston and Philadelphia played such different roles in American history.
Based on the biographies of some three hundred people in each city, this book shows how such distinguished Boston families as the Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Peabodys have produced many generations of men and women who have made major contributions to the intellectual, educational, and political life of their state and nation. At the same time, comparable Philadelphia families such as the Biddles, Cadwaladers, Ingersolls, and Drexels have contributed far fewer leaders to their state and nation. From the days of Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard down to the present, what leadership there has been in Philadelphia has largely been…
Joy Porter is an Irish writer who grew up in war (The Troubles). She is intrigued by how we relate to one another culturally and by what makes peace and conflict happen. She researches Indigenous, environmental, and diplomatic themes in an interdisciplinary context and co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Group at The University of Hull. U.K. Fascinated by the mind, by what makes us love, persevere, transcend and escape the legacies of conflict, her work exposes how culture impacts the world.
No one has ever heard of this book, but it is hilarious! Written by the inimitable poet, critic, author, and wit Robert Graves, it is a rumination on the future of swearing and improper language. Graves had a wonderful ability to talk about things of the utmost gravity in a way that, while not displacing their significance, allowed us to laugh about them. His were, as someone once said, “jests too deep for laughter”. Perhaps at no time in history was such a capability more culturally appropriate and important than during the First World War. Swearing bursts onto the mainstream in this era because, as Graves puts it in Lars Porsena with typical wry insouciance, “Silence under suffering is usually impossible.”
Equal parts history and absurdity, this tongue-in-cheek treatise laments the decline of swearing and foul language in England and looks back with nostalgia at the glory days of oaths and blasphemies. Written when censorship in England was still in full sway, this was an impassionate defense of the foul-mouthed in literature and a resounding attack of hypocrisy and Puritanism.
Over the past several months, I have had the pleasure to work with amazing authors who, like me, have debut children's books that were released in 2021. These books range in topics, from overcoming your fears to transgender to history, to cute rats that will let your imagination run wild. Being a kid myself, my parents read every night to me. These are books that like mine, are filled
with representation that was lacking in those books that were read to me.
This book, that has an amazing feeling cover, tells an important part of not only American history, but more importantly, women's history. This story is beautifully illustrated using a great color pallet. Follow along on Anne’s journey to the new world and how she changed that world forever!
The inspiring story of a Puritan woman whose passion for writing poetry broke barriers.
Late at night, with her children tucked into bed and her husband away on business, Anne Dudley Bradstreet composed poems by candlelight. She let her thoughts from the day tumble out, memorizing each poem line by line before daring to shape the words onto scraps of scarce parchment. Puritan women in the 1600s weren't allowed to be writers. But when the world learned about Anne's poetry, even she was astonished by what happened next.
This charmingly illustrated picture book tells the inspiring story of how a…
I am a historian of early modern law and parliaments in Ireland and Britain, having written several books and articles on the topic, and am also a criminologist. I have had an interest in the history of parliaments for many years, in particular the manner in how they operate, how they were staffed, and how they worked (or in some cases didn’t work). Although political histories are interesting and sometimes important, parliamentary political history does not interest me as much. I love the practical application of how institutions operated and what they can tell us that conventional histories of political development and parliamentary politics can not.
In many ways this book is perhaps the culmination of Elton's considerable published output on parliament, and one where he vociferously defends his outlook on the early Elizabethan English parliament. It is notable that he does spend some time attacking his previous mentor and supervisor, Sir John Neale, in a way that some readers may find more harsh than necessary. Nevertheless, when discussing parliament, the 'puritan choir', and what Elton terms the 'myth of an opposition,' he is producing parliamentary history of the highest order with an insight and writing style that makes for a book that would be difficult to surpass. Like Richardson & Sayles above, Elton's passion for this topic is clearly evident. Like all other authors in this list, he takes what might seem like a mundane topic to the uninformed and uninitiated, and brings it very much to life.
This is a comprehensive account of the parliament of early modern England at work, written by the leading authority on sixteenth-century English, constitutional and political history. Professor Elton explains how parliament dealt with bills and acts, discusses the many various matters that came to notice there, and investigates its role in political matters. In the process he proves that the prevailing doctrine, developed by the work of Sir John Neale, is wrong, that parliament did not acquire a major role in politics; that the notion of a consistent, body of puritan agitators in opposition to the government is mere fiction…
Many of my English ancestors came to New England during the so-called Great Migration of the 1630s. I also have Native American ancestors, and as I researched both groups I couldn’t escape the feeling that something important was missing from our contemporary understanding of the period. In the novel that became Will Poole’s Island, I was in a sense driven to recreate the age, or at least to complicate our received mythologies about it. A central theme of the book is the collision of two radically opposed worldviews that had in common a preoccupation with the visionary and the unseen; this is also a theme of the five narratives described below.
Ok, this isn’t actually a historical novel, but it was a bestseller when it came out back in 1682 and in some ways it does read like fiction. The story of a Puritan settler and her three children who were captured by Narragansett Indians during King Phillip’s War, Rowlandson’s account, judged by contemporary mores, is both racist and religiously bigoted. Still, it provides a rare first-hand rendering of the Puritan experience of a central truth of 17th century America: the collision of two radically distinct societies and the personal fallout resulting from that collision. As such it’s an invaluable historical document—though one best considered alongside other, less publicized primary accounts, which tell us that many seventeenth-century English captives, especially younger ones, were reluctant to return to the English settlements because of the freedom and ease they found in Indian society.
Mary (White) Rowlandson was a colonial American woman who was captured during an attack by Native Americans during King Philip's War and held ransom for 11 weeks. After being released, she wrote A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, also known as The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. It is a work in the literary genre of captivity narratives. It is considered to be one of America's first bestsellers, four editions appearing in 1682 when it was first published.
I’ve always been fascinated by the everyday lives of people from early New England; I want to understand how they experienced their world, made choices, and participated in changing history. Most of these people left no memoirs, so I’ve spent years in all manner of archives, piecing together clues to individual lives. I’ve found extraordinary insights on how and why people farmed in tax valuations, deeper knowledge of their material world in probate court inventories, evidence of neighborly interdependence in old account books, etc. I’ve spent my career as a public historian sharing these stories through museum research and exhibits, public programs, lectures, and writing. I love the hunt – and the story!
Quabbin is a relic of a lost world – both figuratively and literally. In his old age, Francis Underwood remembered his childhood village, the buildings, the personalities, their dress, manners, and speech, their faith and their passions for reform, their old social customs and their emerging middle-class sensibilities – and most of all their stories. But it is a world, as Underwood knew, that was passing away. His secluded old New England village was opening to the world, and its agrarian ways were soon to be eclipsed by the industrial village. What Underwood did not know, but we do, is that his childhood home has literally disappeared, under the flooding waters of the Quabbin Reservoir. This is an extraordinary testimonial to that lost world!
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and…
I believe many writers suspect they are Strangers in a Strange Land. How ironic that I, a confirmed atheist, should use a biblical quote to describe the mindset of authors. Some discover where they belong through their writing. My book recommendations have a strong sense of place, whether it be the Old West, wartime Berlin, or modern-day Scotland. I was born into a 300-year-old N. Ireland Protestant Plantation family, yet many people saw us as interlopers: we weren’t quite Irish, and we weren’t quite British, yet we held dual passports. It was not until I left Ireland that I realized my Irish Heritage exerted a stronger pull than my British.
Like myself, Rankin didn’t start writing fiction until he left his native country. His books could only be set in a city like Edinburgh, with its blend of Puritan zeal, parsimony, and violence. His depiction of his hometown is so enthralling that it started a tourist boom, much like Oxford experienced with Colin Dexter.
I adore how he brings back Rebus after retirement as a detective and straight into conflict with former colleagues and criminals. Rankin realizes that a good detective must be closer to the dark side to be effective. I admire Rebus’s imperfections, even how he copes with his health problems. He’s no white hat, but he gets the job done—his way.
A series of seemingly random disappearances - stretching back to the millennium. A mother determined to find the truth. A retired cop desperate to get his old life back...
It's been some time since Rebus was forced to retire, and he now works as a civilian in a cold-case unit. So when a long-dead case bursts back to life, he can't resist the opportunity to get his feet under the CID desk once more. But Rebus is as stubborn and anarchic as ever, and he quickly finds himself in deep with pretty much everyone, including DI Siobhan Clarke.
