A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America

A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America by Peter Gay offers a brilliant exploration of how early New Englanders wrote their history and what that writing reveals about the Puritan mind. Drawing on figures from William Bradford and Cotton Mather to Jonathan Edwards, Gay shows how colonial historians sought to order the turbulence of settlement, theology, and politics into a providential narrative. At the heart of the book is the paradox that the Puritans, for all their obse...