A Train of Disasters: Puritan Reaction to New England Crisis of 1680-90s

From the 1680-1690s, Puritan New England underwent political and cultural transformations that would eventually turn it from a Puritan “covenanted society,“ virtually independent of the mother country, into a much more open and secular royal province. The main political events that shaped the crisis and transformations alike are the establishment of a royal Dominion of New England in 1686 and its downfall in the bloodless Boston “revolution“ of 1689, “King William’s War“ with the French and their Algonquin allies and, most notorious of all, the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Studying a group of texts, written by political and spiritual elite, Galtsin focuses on how the Puritan colonies reacted to the turbulent decade, and how they saw it in a process of divinely ordained history. Speaker Biography: Dmitry Galtsin is with the department of book history at the Library of Russian Academy of Science, St. Petersburg. He is a Fulbright Fellow in the John W. Kluge Center.