Colonial New England in the context of "Congregationalism in the United States"

The Cambridge Platform is a statement of congregational church government for the churches of colonial New England. It was written in 1648 in response to Presbyterian criticism and served as the religious constitution of Massachusetts until 1780. The platform's preface also endorsed the Westminster Confession. The document was shaped primarily by the Puritan ministers Richard Mather and John Cotton.

John Harvard (1607–1638) was an English Puritan minister in colonial New England whose deathbed bequest to the"schoale or colledge"founded two years earlier by the Massachusetts Bay Colony was so gratefully received that the colony consequently ordered "that theColledgeagreed upon formerly tobebuilt atCambridge shalbeecalled HarvardColledge".

Harvard was born in Southwark, England, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Emmanuel College, Cambridge.In 1637 he emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony – one of the Thirteen Colonies of British America – where he became a teaching elder and assistant preacher of the First Church in Charlestown.

The term Yankee and its contracted form Yank have several interrelated meanings, all referring to people from the United States. Their various meanings depend on the context, and may refer to New Englanders, the Northeastern United States, the Northern United States, or to people from the US in general. Many of the earlier immigrants to the northeast from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and other regions of Europe used Yankees to refer to English settlers in New England.

Outside the United States, Yank is used informally to refer to a person or thing from the US. It has been especially popular in the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand where it may be used variously, either with an uncomplimentary overtone, endearingly, or cordially. In the Southern United States, Yankee is a derisive term which refers to all Northerners, and during the American Civil War it was applied by Confederates to soldiers of the Union army in general. Elsewhere in the United States, it largely refers to people from the Northeast or with New England cultural ties, such as descendants of colonial New England settlers, wherever they live. Its sense is sometimes more cultural than geographical, emphasizing the Calvinist Puritan Christian beliefs and traditions of the Congregationalists who brought their culture when they settled outside New England. The speech dialect of Eastern New England English is called "Yankee" or "Yankee dialect".