SAINTS AND STRANGERS New England in British North America

In the first general history of colonial New England to be published in over 25 years, Joseph A. Conforti synthesizes current and classic scholarship to explore how Puritan saints and "strangers" to Puritanism participated in the making of colonial New England. The description of New England as a "city upon a hill" has tended to reduce the region's history to an exclusively Pilgrim-Puritan drama. Conforti shows that New England was neither as Puritan nor as insular as most familiar stories imply. The Puritan elect--but also Natives, African slaves, and non-Puritan white settlers--became active participants in the creation of colonial New England. Conforti discusses how these subcommunities of strangers to Protestant piety retained their own cultures, coexisted, and even thrived within and beyond the domains of Puritan settlement, creating tensions and pressure points in the later development of early America. Paperback, 2006, 236 pages.