"A Warts-and-All Picture of a Man with the Weaknesses of Any Other"

"And, as would be seen within 30 years of the Stuarts returning to the throne, they were just in- capable of behaving themselves. Perhaps the finest legacy of the regicides and the Protectorate was that the Glorious Revolution proceeded without a King being decapitated (even though James II and VII probably asked for it far more than his errant father had), and—the minor irritations of 1715 and 1745 notwithstanding—at last settled the question of the English Reformation that had started in 1534."

Simon Heffer at The Critic reviews Paul Lay's Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate.

"In America, Our Oldest Christmas Tradition Is, in Fact, the War on Christmas"

"As the Massachusetts minister Increase Mather explained in 1687, Christmas was observed on Dec. 25 not because 'Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian' ones. So naturally, official suppression of Christmas was foundational to the godly colonies in New England.

"On their first Christmas in the New World, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony celebrated the holiday not at all. Instead they worked in the fields. One year, the colony’s governor, William Bradford, yelled at visitors to the colony who, unaware that Christmas was celebrated more in the absence than in the commemoration, were taking the day off. He found them 'in the streete at play, openly; some pitching the barr, and some at stoole-ball, and shuch like sports.' After that incident, no one again tried to take off work for Christmas in the colony."

Rachel N. Schnepper in The New York Times discusses Puritan opposition to celebrating Christmas.

As does Abby Ohlheiser at The Atlantic.

"The First Shots in the American War of Independence Were Fired in England"

"The interesting thing about these colonists was their radicalism, their revolutionary fervor. They were Puritans—but they were more than that. They were merchant-venturers, looking for new markets and business opportunities. They were more than that, too. They were idealists, who went to extraordinary lengths and traveled extraordinary distances to fight for the chance to build a fairer society."

Adrian Tinniswood in The New York Times discusses American colonists who fought in the English Civil War.