American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
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        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
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        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
 J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, American Realities, Volume One: 
Historical Episodes from First Settlements to the Civil War, Chapter Two
 "The First Thanksgiving," by Jennie A. Brownscombe, courtesy of the Wikipedia Commons


2. English Background
    A Puritan Death: John 

   and Thomasine Winthrop

                                                                                                                      Summary

Picture
Puritanism is generally regarded as one of the most important strands in early American culture, but the Puritans often seem inaccessible to us today because of their complex religious ideas. In this essay their doctrines are presented in concrete historical episodes: a personal search for grace, daily life in an English household, a Puritan encounter with death. In the essay we learn how Puritans oriented their lives to a divine being while undergoing recognizable day-to-day experiences. The story ends with John Winthrop taking his Puritan beliefs across the Atlantic from England to America.

Author reads from the Text
In the fall of 1616 the county of Suffolk, England, was a region of great beauty and industry. Travelers walking or riding horses along one of the narrow lanes that led from town to town would have been impressed by the meadows dotted with sheep, the fields of dark soil newly plowed for winter crops, and the fine villages. They would see men and women busy at their tasks: farmers plowing fields behind sturdy horses; dairymaids cleaning stalls and preparing milk, butter, and cheese; housewives making soap or gathering herbs from house gardens; woodsmen cutting timber; and townspeople weaving cloth. In a tavern the visitor might hear men discussing their fields, orchards, and livestock; the land dispute between Smith and Sibley; the marriage of the daughter of a local nobleman; or the religious situation in Germany.

If they had an eye for such things, visitors could also see God in Suffolk County. The Lord was not as discernible as apples or woolens. But He moved over the land, preserving a good man from a bad fall, prospering the fruit crops, punishing a recalcitrant sinner, and engendering a sense of peace and joy in a believer’s heart. It was possible, of course, to live one’s life without being aware of God. Many men and women conducted themselves — their planting and harvesting, cooking and cleaning, begetting and child rearing — as if there were no God. But many others were aware of the presence of the Lord and worshiped him in their homes and churches. Occasionally one of the people of Suffolk left his trim cottage and pleasant fields to dwell in heaven with the Lord.


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Chapter 1: The Native Americans
Chapter 3: The British American