Who were the true revolutionaries? In this November 2025 presentation, renowned historian Francis J. Bremer shows us how, a hundred years before the first shots were fired at Lexington Green, and in the midst of the tumult of the English civil wars, New England Puritans were stirring up trouble - resisting tyranny and creating a new understanding of what liberty meant for them.
Don't miss this final presentation in our important 2025 lecture series Revolutions Before the Revolution. Watch the first three presentations here.
The 1640s and 1650s were a critical time for defining New England's institutions and the principles that underlay them. As New England colonists sent men to fight in England's civil wars, and read the news from the battlefield and parliament, they also faced challenges from local dissidents. Together these forces – from within and without New England – prompted the Puritans to put pen to paper, producing statements of the nature and limits of liberty, the threat of tyranny, and the proper relationship between church and state.
In this talk, award-winning historian Francis J. Bremer explores these principles and how they created a new understanding of citizen rights that would inspire the colonial rebels of the Glorious Revolution in 1689 and the American Revolution in 1775 and 1776.
He’ll also look at how the Puritans defined the elements of what we would call early democracy. How far should the protection of the law cover all who lived in the colony – or should it it protect everyone? They addressed fundamental questions of what characterized a good or bad ruler, and how a bad ruler could be opposed. They questioned the degree to which Massachusetts should be an expression of what some today might call Christian nationalism - that is, how separate should be church and state.
Who were the first American revolutionaries? The minutemen of Lexington and thinkers behind the Declaration of Independence? Or the colonists who first tackled issues of freedom, tyranny and rights a hundred years before them and laid the foundation for the American Revolution? Watch this brilliant, eye-opening presentation and decide for yourself.
Francis J. Bremer is professor emeritus of history at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. He has held fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. He has served as editor of the Winthrop Papers for the Massachusetts Historical Society and is a member of the board of the Congregational Library and Archives. He has published 17 books exploring puritanism in the Atlantic world, including the prize-winning John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father (2003) and Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (2012), the popular Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction (2009), and more recently Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (2015) and One Small Candle: The story of the Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England (2020). He a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Puritanism and is currently writing a biography of Plymouth's governor, William Bradford.