Carey Senior Faculty Fellow 2001-02
John M. Murrin (History)
Princeton University
Upheaval, Social Hysteria, Reform,
and Revolution
in England and the Colonies, 1675-92
This project compares King Philip's War in New England (1675-76);
Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia (1676-77); The Popish Plot and Exclusion
Crisis in England (1678-81); the Glorious Revolution in England,
New England, New York, and Maryland (1688-92); and the Salem Witch
Trials in Massachusetts (1692). All of these societies found scapegoats
for their internal difficulties: Indians in Virginia; Catholics
in England, New York, and Maryland; mostly grandmothers (witches)
in New England. Yet by 1692 they had all reached common ground on
their underlying constitutional assumptions. The English empire
would rest upon liberty, property, and no-popery. How they got to
that point from very different beginnings will be one major theme
of the project. Why they chose different scapegoats will be another.
How those scapegoats combined (Boston detected an international
popish plot in 1689), or failed to combine (Maryland Protestants
failed to create a panic over Indians in 1689, for example) will
be a third. During my semester at the Institute, I intend to emphasize
the anti-Catholic theme from the mid-1670s through 1689. What was
its logic? Was it changing? I suspect that Catholics were feared
less because they endangered Protestant souls than because they
posed a threat to English property rights, but that is something
I have yet to nail down.
|
