A Train of Disasters: Puritan Reaction to New England Crisis of 1680 90s

From the 16801690s, Puritan New England underwent political and cultural transformations that would eventually turn it from a Puritan covenanted society, virtually independent of the mother country, into a much more open and secular royal province. The main political events that shaped the crisis and transformations alike are the establishment of a royal Dominion of New England in 1686 and its downfall in the bloodless Boston revolution of 1689, King William s War with the French and their Algonquin allies and, most notorious of all, the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Studying a group of texts, written by political and spiritual elite, Galtsin focuses on how the Puritan colonies reacted to the turbulent decade, and how they saw it in a process of divinely ordained history. Speaker Biography: Dmitry Galtsin is with the department of book history at the Library of Russian Academy of Science, St. Petersburg. He is a Fulbright Fellow in the John W. Kluge Center.