The Puritan Ordeal

This book is about the experience of becoming American in the seventeenth century. It has in some respects the appearance of a study in intellectual history, but I prefer to think of it as a contribution to the history of what the Puritans called affections. My hope is to help advance our understanding not of ideas so much as of feeling-specifically of the affective life of some of the men and women who emigrated to New England more than three hundred fifty years ago, but also of the persistent sense of renewal and risk that has attended the project of becoming American ever since.