"The Lord Christ intends to achieve greater matters by this little handful than the world is aware of." EDWARD JOHNSON, Wonder-Working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England 1654...

This book contains the substance of the lectures originally given at the Washington University, St. Louis, in May, 1887, in the course of my annual visit to that institution as University Professor of American History. The lectures were repeated in the following month of June at Portland, Oregon, and since then either the whole course, or one or more of the lectures, have been given in Boston, Newton, Milton, Chelsea, New Bedford, Lowell, Worcester, Springfield, and Pittsfield, Mass.; Farmington

It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date 476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was in that year that the soldier of fortune, Odovakar, commander of the Herulian mercenaries in Italy, sent the handsome boy Romulus, son of Ores

In the preceding chapter I endeavoured to set forth and illustrate some of the chief causes which have shifted the world's political centre of gravity from the Mediterranean and the Rhine to the Atlantic and the Mississippi; from the men who spoke Latin to the men who speak English. In the course of the exposition we began to catch glimpses of the wonderful significance of the fact that—among the people who had first suggested the true solution of the difficult problem of making a powerful natio

When Captain George Weymouth in the summer of 1605 sailed into the harbour of Plymouth in Devonshire, with his five kidnapped savages and his glowing accounts of the country since known as New England, the garrison of that fortified seaport was commanded by Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The Christian name of this person now strikes us as rather odd, but in those days it was not so uncommon in England, and it does not necessarily indicate a Spanish or Italian ancestry for its bearer. Gorges was a man of

The Puritan exodus to New England, which came to an end about 1640, was purely and exclusively English. There was nothing in it that came from the continent of Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very little that was Welsh. As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that had been planted in New England by 1640 "thenceforward continued to multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable seclusion from other communities." During the whole of this period New England rece

For eight-and-thirty years after the destruction of the Pequots, the intercourse between the English and the Indians was to all outward appearance friendly. The policy pursued by the settlers was in the main well considered. While they had shown that they could strike with terrible force when blows were needed, their treatment of the natives in time of peace seems to have been generally just and kind. Except in the single case of the conquered Pequot territory, they scrupulously paid for every r

The beginnings of New England were made in the full daylight of modern history. It was an age of town records, of registered deeds, of contemporary memoirs, of diplomatic correspondence, of controversial pamphlets, funeral sermons, political diatribes, specific instructions, official reports, and private letters. It was not a time in which mythical personages or incredible legends could flourish, and such things we do find in the history of New England. There was nevertheless a romantic side to

An interesting account of the Barons' War and the meeting of the first House of Commons is given in Prothero's Simon de Montfort , London, 1877. For Wyclif and the Lollards, see Milman's Latin Christianity , vol. viI. — The ecclesiastical history of the Tudor period may best be studied in the works of John Strype, to wit, Historical Memorials , 6 vols.; Annals of the Reformation , 7 vols.; Lives of Cranmer, Parker, Whitgift, etc. , Oxford, 1812-28. See also Burnet's History of the Reformation of

1 ( return ) [ Milman, Lat. Christ. vii. 395.] 2 ( return ) [ Gardiner, The Puritan Revolution , p. 12.] 3 ( return ) [ Green, History of the English People , iii. 47.] 4 ( return ) [ Steele's Life of Brewster, p. 161.] 5 ( return ) [ Gardiner, Puritan Revolution , p. 50.] 6 ( return ) [ It is now 204 years since a battle has been fought in England. The last was Sedgmoor in 1685. For four centuries, since Bosworth, in 1485, the English people have lived in peace in their own homes, except for th