New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620-1860

John McWilliams’ book is an ambitious attempt to review New England history and literature from the Puritans through the Revolutionary period to the antebellum era. McWilliams demonstrates how successive narratives of crises, real or imagined, reflected historical realities which proved adaptable to later settlers. Offering an all-encompassing narrative of one crucial region in the American literary and historical experience, he brings to light new contexts for understanding crucial events in early American literature and history.