Puritans at Play - 10th Edition by Na Na (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For over four centuries, "Puritan" has been a synonym for dour, joyless, and repressed. In the tenth anniversary edition of Puritans at Play, Bruce Daniels reappraises the accuracy of this grim portrait by examining leisure and recreation in Colonial and Revolutionary New England. Chapters on music, dinner parties, dancing, sex, alcohol, taverns, and sports are presented in a lively style that makes this book as entertaining as it is illuminating.

Review Quotes

"Daniels' account is a serious contribution to Puritan scholarship, serving to recharacterize our Puritan fathers in their full human dimensions."--"Kirkus Reviews"

"It is rare for a book to be both erudite and amusing at the same time, and this book has succeeded. It has changes the common but unacceptable image of the Puritans as dull, solemn, melancholy misanthropes."--Horton Davies, author of "The Worship of the American Puritans"

"Daniels succeeds admirably in providing a fuller and better understanding of the changing everyday experiences of New England Puritans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."--Maris A. Vinovskis, University of Michigan, "American Historical Review"

About the Author

Bruce C. Daniels, Professor of History at Texas Tech University, is a specialist on colonial and Revolutionary New England and on international views of American history. He is a past president of the Canadian Association for American Studies and in the spring of 2005 was the Nikolai Sivachev Distinguished Fulbright Chair at Moscow State University