Puritan in the context of William Fulke

Congregationalism (also Congregational Churches or Congregationalist Churches) is a Reformed Christian (Calvinist) tradition of Protestant Christianity in which churches practice congregational government. Each congregation independently and autonomously runs its own affairs. These principles are enshrined in the Cambridge Platform (1648) and the Savoy Declaration (1658), Congregationalist confessions of faith. The Congregationalist Churches are a continuity of the theological tradition upheld by the Puritans. Their genesis was through the work of Congregationalist divines Robert Browne, Henry Barrowe, and John Greenwood.

In the United Kingdom, the Puritan Reformation of the Church of England laid the foundation for such churches. In England, early Congregationalists were called Separatists or Independents to distinguish them from the similarly Calvinistic Presbyterians, whose churches embraced a polity based on the governance of elders; this commitment to self-governing congregations was codified in the Savoy Declaration. Congregationalism in the United States traces its origins to the Puritans of New England, who wrote the Cambridge Platform of 1648 to describe the autonomy of the church and its association with others. Within the United States, the model of Congregational churches was carried by migrating settlers from New England into New York, then into the Old Northwest, and further.

A devotional song is a hymn that accompanies religious observances and rituals. Traditionally devotional music has been a part of Hindu music, Jewish music, Buddhist music, Islamic music and Christian music.

Each major religion has its own tradition with devotional hymns. In Christianity, the devotional has been a part of the liturgy in Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, and others, since their earliest days. A devotional is a part of the prayer service proper and is not, in these contexts, ornamentation. Within the Reformed tradition, church music in general was hotly debated; some Puritans objected to all ornament and sought to abolish choirs, hymns, and, inasmuch as liturgy itself was rejected, devotionals.

Roger Williams (c. 1603 – March 1683) was an English-born New England minister, theologian, author, and founder of the Providence Plantations, which became the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and later the State of Rhode Island. He was a staunch advocate for religious liberty, separation of church and state, and fair dealings with the Native Americans.

Initially a Puritan minister, his beliefs evolved and he questioned the authority of the Puritan church in enforcing religious conformity. He was expelled by the Puritan leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and he established Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge offering what he termed "liberty of conscience" making Rhode Island the first government in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom in its founding charter. His ideas on religious tolerance and civil government directly influenced the principles later enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. He briefly became a Baptist, and in 1638 he founded the First Baptist Church in America in Providence. He then moved beyond organized religion, becoming a "seeker" who did not identify with any specific church. Williams studied the language of the New England Native Americans and published the first book-length study of it in English.

In Welsh and English church history, Independents were a Puritan group who advocated local congregational control of religious and church matters, without any wider geographical hierarchy, either ecclesiastical or political. They were particularly prominent during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms as well under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. The New Model Army became the champion of Independent religious views and its members helped carry out Pride's Purge in December 1648.

Unlike their Presbyterian allies, Independents rejected any state role in religious practice, including the Church of England, and advocated freedom of religion for most non-Catholics. Their religious views led some to back radical political groups such as the Levellers, who supported concepts like Republicanism, universal suffrage and joint ownership of property.

Thomas Hooker (July 5, 1586 – July 7, 1647) was a prominent English colonial leader and Congregational minister, who founded the Connecticut Colony after dissenting with Puritan leaders in Massachusetts. He was known as an outstanding speaker and an advocate of universal Christian suffrage.

Called today "the Father of Connecticut", Hooker was a towering figure in the early development of colonial New England. He was one of the great preachers of his time, an erudite writer on Christian subjects, the first minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the first settlers and founders of both the city of Hartford and the state of Connecticut. He has been cited by many as the inspiration for the "Fundamental Orders of Connecticut", which some have described as the world's first written democratic constitution establishing a representative government.

Restoration literature is the English literature written during the historical period commonly referred to as the English Restoration (1660–1688), which corresponds to the last years of Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogeneous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news becoming a commodity, the essay developing into a periodical art form, and the beginnings of textual criticism.

The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention, and they differ markedly from genre to genre. Thus, the "Restoration" in drama may last until 1700, while in poetry it may last only until 1666 (see 1666 in poetry) and the annus mirabilis; and in prose it might end in 1688, with the increasing tensions over succession and the corresponding rise in journalism and periodicals, or not until 1700, when those periodicals grew more stabilized. In general, scholars use the term "Restoration" to denote the literature that began and flourished under Charles II, whether that literature was the laudatory ode that gained a new life with restored aristocracy, the eschatological literature that showed an increasing despair among Puritans, or the literature of rapid communication and trade that followed in the wake of England's mercantile empire.

The Fortune Playhouse was an historic theatre in London. It was located between Whitecross Street and the modern Golden Lane, just outside the City of London. It was founded about 1600, and suppressed by the Puritan Parliament in 1642.

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a historical novel by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and then struggles to lead a new life of repentance and dignity. As punishment, she must wear a scarlet letter 'A' (for "adultery"). Containing a number of religious and historic allusions, the book explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.

The Scarlet Letter was one of the first mass-produced books in the United States. It was popular when first published and is considered a classic work of American literature. Commonly listed among the Great American Novels, it has inspired numerous film, television, and stage adaptations. Critics have described The Scarlet Letter as a masterwork, and novelist D. H. Lawrence called it a "perfect work of the American imagination".

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.

New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. With a population of 134,023 at the 2020 census, it is the third-most populous city in Connecticut and the largest in the South Central Connecticut Planning Region, with the Greater New Haven metropolitan area having an estimated 577,000 residents.

New Haven was one of the first planned cities in the U.S. A year after its founding by English Puritans in 1638, eight streets were laid out in a three-by-three grid, creating the "Nine Square Plan". The central common block is the New Haven Green, a 16-acre (6 ha) square at the center of Downtown New Haven. The Green is now a National Historic Landmark, and the "Nine Square Plan" is recognized by the American Planning Association as a National Planning Landmark.

Piscataway (English pronunciation: /pɪsˈkætəweɪ/ ) is a township in Middlesex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is a suburb of the New York metropolitan area, in the Raritan Valley. As of the 2020 United States census, the township was the eighth most populous municipality of any kind in Central Jersey with a population of 60,804, an increase of 4,760 (+8.5%) from the 2010 census count of 56,044, which in turn reflected an increase of 5,562 (+11.0%) from 50,482 at the 2000 census.

The name may be derived from the area's earliest European settlers who came from near the Piscataqua River, a landmark defining the coastal border between New Hampshire and Maine, whose name derives from peske (branch) and tegwe (tidal river), or alternatively from pisgeu (meaning "dark night") and awa ("place of") or from a Lenape language word meaning "great deer". The area was appropriated in 1666 by Quakers and Baptists who had left the Puritan colony in New Hampshire.

Downtown Newark is the central business district of Newark in Essex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.

Downtown is the site of the original Puritan settlement of Newark located at a bend in the Passaic River. The first settlers, led by Robert Treat, landed not far from the present site of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The intersection of Broad and Market Streets, known as the Four Corners was once considered the busiest intersection in the nation, and is the heart of traditional downtown.

William Claiborne (also spelled "Clayborne", b. c. 1600  – d. c. 1677) was an English surveyor and early settler in the colonies/provinces of Virginia and Maryland and around the Chesapeake Bay. Claiborne became a wealthy merchant and planter, as well as a major political figure in the mid-Atlantic colonies, and the founder of one of the First Families of Virginia. He featured in disputes between the colonists of Virginia and the later settling of Maryland, partly because of his earlier trading post on Kent Island in the mid-way of the Chesapeake Bay, which provoked the first naval military battles in North American waters. Claiborne repeatedly attempted and failed to regain Kent Island from the Maryland Calverts, sometimes by force of arms, after its inclusion in the lands that were granted by a 1632 Royal Charter to the Calvert family. Kent Island had become Maryland territory after the surrounding lands were granted to Lord Baltimore by Charles I, King of England.

Claiborne was an Anglican, a Puritan sympathizer, and deeply resentful of the Calverts' Catholicism. He was one of the signers, along with Virginia Governor John Pott, Samuel Matthews, and Roger Smyth, of a letter to the King's Privy Council, dated 30 November 1629, complaining that Lord Baltimore refused to take the Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy to the Church of England. He sided with Parliament during the English Civil War and was appointed to a commission charged with subduing and managing the Province of Virginia and Province of Maryland, both British colonies at the time. He played a role in the submission of Virginia to parliamentary rule in this period. Following the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, he retired from involvement in the politics of the Virginia colony. He died around 1677 at his plantation, Romancoke, on Virginia's Pamunkey River. According to historian Robert Brenner, "William Claiborne may have been the most consistently influential politician in Virginia throughout the whole of the pre-Restoration period".

John Lilburne (c. 1614 – 29 August 1657), also known as Freeborn John, was an English political Leveller before, during and after the English Civil Wars 1642–1650. He coined the term "freeborn rights", defining them as rights with which every human being is born, as opposed to rights bestowed by government or human law. In his early life he was a Puritan, though towards the end of his life he became a Quaker. His works have been cited in opinions by the United States Supreme Court.

Proscription (Latin: proscriptio) is, in current usage, a 'decree of condemnation to death or banishment' (Oxford English Dictionary) and can be used in a political context to refer to state-approved murder or banishment. The term originated in Ancient Rome, where it included public identification and official condemnation of declared enemies of the state and it often involved confiscation of property.

Its usage has been significantly widened to describe governmental and political sanctions of varying severity on individuals and classes of people who have fallen into disfavor, from the en masse suppression of adherents of unorthodox ideologies to the suppression of political rivals or personal enemies. In addition to its recurrences during the various phases of the Roman Republic, it has become a standard term to label: