Orthodoxy in Massachusetts 1630-1950

In 1928, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I unaccountably found John Winthrop’s Journal exerting upon me a baneful spell. I resisted manfully, as long as I could, but Governor Winthrop irresistibly lured me to the brink of commitment, and so I threw myself from the precipice of twentieth-century prejudice into the maelstrom of his epoch.One of my most revered instructors tried to prevent me. This, he said, was an ignis fatuus. All the hay of New England Puritanism had been thr