The character of the good ruler;: A study of Puritan political ideas in New England, 1630-1730,

by T.H. Breen

"There has long been a need for a monograph that provides a solid seventeenth-century background for portions of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution…[this] goes a long way toward filling this need with its investigations into rhetoric, philosophy, and politics during the first hundred years after the Winthrop fleet arrived in North America.

"Although the direction of the study seems to alternate from a pursuit of the New England conception of the ideal ruler on tone hand to a survey of the political history of the Bay Colony on the other, the concurrent themes in no way detract from its importance as a chronicle of change in the years when the European world passed from an age of religion into an age of reason. In New England, according to the book, the key event in this transformation was the Glorious Revolution. …

"Unlike recent scholarship on the period, the author makes no attempt to read between the lines or make psychoanalytical judgments from his materials. Neither does he uncover hidden meanings that could not be discerned by other readers of the same documents.…

"Although the work is intended for the specialist in early American history, the discussions of political events on both sides of the Atlantic are expansive enough to be understood by a reader with only a casual knowledge of New England's past. Yet the inclusion of much that is well known to historians does not mask the fact that the book is the product of meticulous and extensive research." -- B. Richard Burg, review in The New England Quarterly (June 1971)

Genres: Politics

301 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Timothy H. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. He is also the founding director of the Kaplan Humanities Center and the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern. Breen is a specialist on the American Revolution; he studies the history of early America with a special interest in political thought, material culture, and cultural anthropology.

Breen received his Ph.D in history from Yale University. He also holds an honorary MA from Oxford University. In addition to the appointment at Northwestern University, he has taught at Cambridge University (as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions), at Oxford University (as the Harmsworth Professor of American History), and at University of Chicago, Yale University, and California Institute of Technology. He is an honorary fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has also enjoyed research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Humboldt Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Mellon Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. An essay he published on the end of slavery in Massachusetts became the basis for a full-length opera that was produced in Chicago. He has written for the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books.