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 Wa
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...