America: a New England, a New World

New England has played a commanding role in the development of the United States. The texts The Birth of the Republic and America, A Concise History offer a balanced and rational appraisal of the region's impact on American history. The curious blend of Puritan religion, strident intellectualism, and Anglicized culture that define New England has also to a large extent defined the United States as a whole. Although other regions have influenced the course of our Nation's history, none has had the overarching and widespread influence that New England has. The Puritans were religiously oriented, and focused on the divine, rather than the political. Although their concern was more with the hereafter than the here and now, they emphasized how behavior in the here and now would affect the individual's situation in the hereafter. The Puritans sought to influence others to their way of thinking with respect to the way life should be governed, legally and morally.

New England's influence on American political affairs started well before the Revolutionary war. The Puritans who settled New England "believed that each congregation should be self-governing, free from control by either a religious or political hierarchy. In that sense they anticipated the 'separation of church and state'" (Morgan, p. 45). The separation of church and state would become one of the hallmarks of American Democracy, and the New England Puritans' influence in

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st opened fire on Americans in Boston in 1770, killing 3 and wounding 8. The Boston Massacre, as it came to be known, was an atrocity that galvanized the rest of the colonies (Henretta, pp. 46-48). Although the colonies were not quite ready to break out of the colonial mold, the bad feelings engendered by the Boston Massacre provided an ominous background for the events to come. After the Massacre the colonies enjoyed three years of terse and sometimes contentious relations with England, but it was once again in Boston that the tides of colonial-British relations began to point towards a war. The similarly eponymously named Boston Tea Party was perhaps the straw that broke the camel's back. Boston's rebellion against the Tea Act led to the Coercive Acts, intended to "bring the bumptious Bostonians to their knees" (Morgan, p. 59). Rather than be cowed by Boston's punishment, the other colonies "concluded that Boston was martyred because it stood foremost in defense of colonial rights, and they took up collections and showered the beleaguered city with provisions" (Morgan, p. 60). It was as a direct result of Britain's treatment of Boston and Boston's increasing agitation against the British Parliament that the first Contin
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Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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