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They seemed a grim, humorless bunch.>>>>>

You would be grim and humorless and disciplined too if you moved to an alien continent with deep dark forests and were surrounded by hostiles who took scalps and found prolonged torture of prisoners to be the highest entertainment

I’m sure they would have been much more pleasant chaps if (like us) they had cable TV and DVD players and idiotic Hollywood movies to watch to take the edge off. Screw that God fantasy. I like Hollywood’s pagan fantasies better

You would be grim and humorless and disciplined too if you moved to an alien continent with deep dark forests and were surrounded by hostiles who took scalps and found prolonged torture of prisoners to be the highest entertainment

Don't mess with their women, either. One time, after Indian raiding parties had captured a bunch of fishermen from the coastal settlements, a group of rioting fishermen's wives actually tore two Indian captives apart, limb by limb (seriously!)

As every child of New England (aka Norumbega) already knows, the Puritans were death on wheels to Catholics, Anglicans (especially Maypole Morris Dancers), Unitarians, Baptists, and the Plymouth Bretheren, (No Virginia, the Pilgrims were NOT Puritans, and were actually pretty snappy dressers) and whipped Quakers naked through the streets of Boston, in that order. But whenever they got their hands on a rabbi, and there were quite a few Sephardic Jews hanging around, they made him a professor, as every Harvard and even Yale man at the time had to know Hebrew to properly read the OT. Just notice the place names they gave their settlements, Bethel, New Canaan, Salem, New Salem, etc. etc. etc.

The Puritans=Congregationalists=hard-nosed Calvinist= Presbyterians made their religion the state religion of their colonies ... and states. Congregationalism was the OFFICIAL religion of Massachusetts until 1820! They begrudging allowed other sects after the Revolution, BUT Congregationalism was state-supported... with tax money.

Good people. Not, unfortunately, especially nice people, if you weren't on the team.