Lecture Notes - Chapter 2
Required Reading
Assignment
1. Describe the main contours of English colonization in the seventeenth century.
2. Identify the obstacles the English settlers in the Chesapeake had to overcome.
3. Explain how Virginia and Maryland developed in their early years.
4. Identify what made the English settlement of New England distinctive.
5. Describe the main sources of discord in early New England.
6. Explain how the English Civil War affected the colonies in America.
• What motivated England to colonize the New World? How similar to or different from Spain’s motives, discussed in Chapter 1, were England’s?
• Why was the Jamestown Colony unstable and its survival questionable? Who settled there? What were their goals? How did they interact with the Indians?
• Explain the religious attitudes of settlers in Maryland. How did those compare to the religious attitudes in Massachusetts and in Rhode Island? How was religious freedom defined in each of these colonies? How do these attitudes compare to American attitudes today?
• What were the differences between the Pilgrims and the Puritans? Were they the same? Compare the Plymouth Colony with the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
• How were Puritan women expected to achieve genuine freedom?
• Explain how Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson showed how the Puritan belief in each individual’s ability to interpret the Bible could easily lead to criticism of the religious establishment.
• Discuss the idea of the rights of Englishmen and what that meant to the settlers in the New World. How did the English Civil War affect the colonists’ understanding of their rights?
• Discuss Puritan theology. How does it compare to your own theology, if you have one? How does it use the utopian ideas of America as a place to begin anew—as a place to be able to worship and govern freely—to justify its rather rigid doctrine?
• What points do you imagine John Winthrop and Roger Williams would have made in a debate about church-state relations? Explore this by creating a fictional dialogue between the two men.