New England Puritans established the Half-Way Covenant, an agreement extending partial church membership to church members’ children who had not yet experienced conversion. Solomon Stoddard, grandfather ofreligious leader Jonathan Edwards, was among the major proponents of the Covenant.
Solomon Stoddard led the first of at least five religious “harvests” stirring evangelical revivalism in Northampton, Massachusetts. Stoddard’s other Northampton revivals followed in 1683, 1696, 1712, and 1718.
Boston Puritans hanged two Quakers under a 1658 law prohibiting Quakers in Massachusetts.
Thomas Cromwell and the Puritans assumed power in England.
The Massachusetts Bay Company was the commercial venture founded by John Winthrop and chartered by King Charles I in 1629 to establish a colony in New England. The company founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 as a theocratic Puritan settlement.
John Winthrop (1558–1649), a lawyer, was one of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony and the colony’s first governor. Winthrop sailed to Massachusetts in 1630. As the Puritans prepared to create a community in the New World, Winthrop delivered his sermon on “A Modell of Christian Charity,” declaring that “we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” He served as governor several times throughout his twenty years in New England and his journals provide a...
Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612–1672) was an English Puritan who sailed with her family to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Bradstreet became the first woman published in England and America with the release of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America in 1650. Her work often dealt with religious and domestic themes.
Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643) was an English-born Massachusetts Puritan who organized religious meetings for women and challenged the political authority of the clergy. As a result, Hutchinson was tried in 1637 for “traducing the ministers” of the church. John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, served as both prosecutor and judge in her trial. Hutchinson was declared “a woman not fit for our society” and excommunicated from the church. Banished from Massachusetts, Hutchinson...
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was settled in 1630 by a group of English Puritans who left England to escape religious persecution. The Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony established a strict theocratic government. In 1684 the Crown, concerned about colony’s growing independence, annulled the colony’s charter and created a royal government under a new charter in 1691.