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The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts
The Making of an American Thinking Class Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts Author:Darren Staloff A radical new interpretation of the political and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts, this work envisions the Bay colony as a seventeenth century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological 'cells' and authority was restricted to an educated elite of ministers and magistrates. Author Darren Staloff shows how the colony'... more »s course of events was dictated by the struggles of laypersons against the Puritan "thinking class," eventually leading to the erosion of the Puritan intellectuals' political authority and the colony's transformation into a Puritan lay republic in the years before the loss of the charter. Staloff offers a strategy for synthesizing the hitherto disparate fields of social and intellectual history by treating intellectuals as a distinct social group with their own interests and agendas.« less