Where Do We Belong?
A study of English settlers in America raises profound questions of identity.
A few years ago I was researching the East Anglian witch-hunt when people kept disappearing – people like a couple from Maldon in Essex, persistent puritan absentees from church. In 1638 officials of the archdeacon of Colchester gave up chasing them, scribbling against their names: ‘Gone to New England.’ In hundreds of English communities divided by politics and religion, individuals either drifted into the Civil War or they left.
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