John Winthrop Critical Essay | Critical Essay by James G. Moseley

Critical Essay by James G. Moseley

SOURCE: "Ways of Making History in Early New England," in John Winthrop's World: History as a Story, The Story as History, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, pp. 130-47.

In the following excerpt, Moseley focuses on Winthrop 's journal as a history, noting its exemplification of a Puritan point of view, and comparing it with other historical accounts.

Winthrop's Journal was not only about Puritans; it was a Puritan history. This quality, so quickly lost by those who wrote about the early Puritans, comes clearly into focus when Winthrop's history is compared with the other great history of first-generation New England. Like the Puritans' Winthrop, the Pilgrims' William Bradford was both governor and historian, and the two men interacted as leaders of communities as close as Boston and Plimouth. For all their day-to-day cooperation, though, the theological differences between the Puritans and Separatists had important consequences for the ways the...
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