#101 The Rise of the Puritans Part 1: Parliament Confronts the Crown
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Between 1628 and 1640 perhaps 20,000 Puritans would leave England and settle in Boston and environs. Then English immigration to Massachusetts would stop as abruptly as it started. The Puritans of Massachusetts would thrive with only trivial incremental immigration for the next 200 years, creating a uniquely American society in New England, a homogeneous world with its own culture and polity that would eventually become the beating heart of the American Revolution. In this episode and the next, we talk about the theological and political forces that set the stage for the Puritan Great Migration, and the new articulation of English political liberty during the crucial second and third decades of the 17th century that arose from conflict over the scope of royal power between Sir Edward Coke and King James I.
Errata: A listener pointed out that Luther posted 95 theses, rather than the 99 I somehow said and sadly missed in post-production. Must have been thinking of red balloons.
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Selected references for this episode
John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America
English Reformation (Wikipedia)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 101. |
| 0:11.4 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this on January 4th, 2022, in my bedroom closet in New Orleans. |
| 0:21.0 | We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. |
| 0:28.3 | We believe there's dignity in our national story, along with tragedy, triumph, brilliance, hypocrisy, magnificence, |
| 0:37.1 | depravity, corruption, venality, inspiration, oppression, |
| 0:43.2 | genius, defeat, and glory. |
| 0:47.8 | Happy New Year, everybody. |
| 0:49.8 | We begin the third year of the history of the Americans podcast with this episode. |
| 0:56.0 | In the first two years, we pumped out 102 episodes, including the two introductions, so almost one a week. |
| 1:03.6 | We now have 301 ratings on Apple Podcasts, all but nine of which are five stars. |
| 1:13.4 | Thank you very much for that, by the way, |
| 1:21.3 | except for the three one-star people who I choose to think were just being mean. And through yesterday exceeded 400,000 aggregate downloads and listens, which is pretty good. |
| 1:32.5 | That's a lot of time you guys spent listening to this podcast, which is very gratifying. |
| 1:39.3 | We have been iterating our way through the 1620s into the 1640s for some time, and we'll continue to do for at least the next few episodes because a great deal is happening |
| 1:43.9 | in the lands |
| 1:45.2 | encompassing today's United States. On a simple level, the significance of the period is measured |
| 1:51.7 | in the growth of the population of Europeans and descendants of Europeans. In 1620, the aggregate |
| 1:58.9 | population of such people in today's United States was less than 2,500 people, almost all of whom were in Virginia and the region of the James River, Florida, and New Mexico. |
| 2:11.1 | There were tiny numbers of Europeans in fishing outposts along the main coast, and at the very end of 1620, the Mayflower landed |
| 2:19.1 | at Patuxet, which the passengers named New Plymouth, following the precedent of John Smith's map |
| 2:25.3 | of New England. By 1640, the population of Europeans and their descendants in today's United |
| 2:31.8 | States had grown more than 10-fold to as much as 27,000. |
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