New England Nation provides an engaging social history of the extraordinary Puritan world that flowered into a vibrant civilization in seventeenth-century New England and then implanted itself into American history. The book opens by situating Puritanism in the European and English reformations and then examines seventeenth-century New England as an autonomous, holistic society based on Puritan principles, and also as a part of the Atlantic and British colonial worlds. It then teases out subsequent Puritan influence on the next four centuries of American culture. Farmers, sailors, and sinners join the usual Puritan ministers of the seventeenth century and so, too, do women, children, Indians, and dissenters. The physical and material world are included in the story as much as the spiritual world. Combining fascinating primary sources with a lively narrative, this book makes the first Pilgrim nation a believable place with real people who have many of the same fears and pleasures as today's Americans.