Download or read book The Making of an American Thinking Class written by Darren Staloff and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pathbreaking study offers a radical new interpretation of the political, religious, and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts. More than simply a theologically inspired Biblical commonwealth, the church state of the Bay Colony was a seventeenth-century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological cells.