{"id":34670,"date":"2016-05-04T01:00:32","date_gmt":"2016-05-04T05:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34670"},"modified":"2022-11-24T12:24:11","modified_gmt":"2022-11-24T17:24:11","slug":"qotd-the-puritans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/05\/04\/qotd-the-puritans\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Puritans"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hear about these people every Thanksgiving, then never think about them again for the next 364 days. They were a Calvinist sect that dissented against the Church of England and followed their own brand of dour, industrious, fun-hating Christianity. Most of them were from East Anglia, the part of England just northeast of London. They came to America partly because they felt persecuted, but mostly because they thought England was full of sin and they were at risk of absorbing the sin by osmosis if they didn\u2019t get away quick and build something better. They really liked \u201ccity on a hill\u201d metaphors.<\/p>\n

I knew about the Mayflower<\/em>, I knew about the black hats and silly shoes, I even knew about the time Squanto threatened to release a bioweapon buried under Plymouth Rock that would bring about the apocalypse<\/a>. But I didn\u2019t know that the Puritan migration to America was basically a eugenicist\u2019s wet dream.<\/p>\n

Much like eg Unitarians today, the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan \u201chomeland\u201d of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it \u201caccounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.\u201d<\/p>\n

Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that \u201cit may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation\u201d and that \u201cthose who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England\u201d. Puritan \u201cheadhunters\u201d went back to England to recruit \u201cgodly men\u201d and \u201chonest men\u201d who \u201cmust not be of the poorer sort\u201d.<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Albion’s Seed<\/em>“, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2016-04-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hear about these people every Thanksgiving, then never think about them again for the next 364 days. They were a Calvinist sect that dissented against the Church of England and followed their own brand of dour, industrious, fun-hating Christianity. Most of them were from East Anglia, the part of England just northeast of London. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,41,13],"tags":[360,554,472,1310,907,1496],"class_list":["post-34670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-christianity","tag-immigration","tag-massachusetts","tag-puritanism","tag-snobbery","tag-thanksgiving"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-91c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34670"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51484,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34670\/revisions\/51484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}