I grew up memorializing Puritans, maybe more than most. In 1976 in Massachusetts it was not just John Hancock and Samuel Adams who were in our elementary-school classrooms but also the Puritans, those pious rebels who, as we learned, gave birth to the American Revolution. It was not any particular Puritan. It was the Puritans, our Puritans, and anything we needed to learn about being American would start with them. At school, we girls sewed bonnets and learned quilting, proving that our hands “a needle better fit” after all. On field trips, we went to Old Sturbridge Village and walked through small doors into dark kitchens that smelled of smoke and stone. We watched as a woman tended iron pots hanging from hooks over a deep hearth. We visited the blacksmith; we practiced dipping candles; we hushed ourselves up and sat down in pews. On the bus ride home, the...
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December 1, 2018
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Research Article|
December 01 2018
Moving Memories: The Puritans We Need
Kathleen Donegan
Kathleen Donegan
Kathleen Donegan is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). She is currently working on a project titled “The Spectral Plantation: The Otherworlds of Slavery,” about psychic modes of departure within the plantation complex.
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American Literature (2018) 90 (4): 855–862.
Citation
Kathleen Donegan; Moving Memories: The Puritans We Need. American Literature 1 December 2018; 90 (4): 855–862. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7208584
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