| Summary: | As colonists made their way to the northern British colonies in the early seventeenth century, they hoped their efforts would stand as a "citty upon a hill." In doing so, they often relied on the seemingly contradictory theological convictions of puritanism to organize colonial society. Complicating life in this new society was the fact that it included colonists from Europe, indigenous Americans, and enslaved Africans. This book investigates the ways these New Englanders used, constructed, and reconstructed their puritanism to make sense of their new realities. As they did so, they created more than a tenuous existence together. They also constructed race out of the spiritual freedom of puritanism. Revising the timing of the construction of race in America, this book contends that as New Englanders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries offered spiritual redemption, they then found it necessary to define how they differed from one another, especially from Native Americans and Africans. The book explores how proponents of the New England variant of puritanism made race out of their offers of spiritual freedom, setting the stage for similar processes when physical and social freedom became more accessible to New Englanders of color in the generations following the American Revolution
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