In 1630, Massachusetts Bay opened the floodgates to religious dissenters. For the next 12 years a torrent of Puritans poured out of their troubled homeland and into New England. By 1642 when the English Civil War brought the exodus to an abrupt end, the 21,000 religious purists of the ...
The 1628 chartering of the Massachusetts Bay Colony resulted in a wave of mi- gration; by 1634, New England had been settled by some 10,000 Puritans. Between the late 1610s and the Americ- an Revolution, an estimated 50,000 convicts were shipped to England's, and later Great Britain's...