By John Winthrop

FROM THE PREFACE: “The Puritans of New England are not in good repute today. Authors and critics who aspire to any degree of sophistication take care to repudiate them. Liberals and conservatives alike find it advantageous to label the meas- ures they oppose as Puritan. Whatever is wrong with the American mind is attributed to its Puritan ancestry, and anything that escapes these assaults is smothered under a homespun mantle of quaintness by lovers of the antique. Seventeenth-century Massachusetts has thus become in retrospect a preposterous land of witches and witch hunters, of kill-joys in tall-crowned hats, whose main occu- pation was to prevent each other from having any fun and whose sole virtue lay in their furniture.”

NY. Little, Brown and Company .1958.233p.