Under Dispute

Agnes Repplier turns her formidable wit and precision on thePuritan founders in this bracing collection of essays, and what emerges is neither hagiography nor condemnation but something far more unsettling: a clear-eyed reckoning with the contradictions that built America. The Puritans wanted lofty things and paid any price for them, including the price of their own humanity. Repplier examines the harsh specifics, the four years without cows, the children who died for lack of milk, the survivors who watched half their company perish in the first terrible winter, and asks what it would take to judge such people fairly. She traces thePuritan character through their own writings, their theological certainty, their unyielding sense of mission, and the pragmatism that kept them alive. This is cultural criticism at its most elegant: an essayist using history to hold a mirror to the present, asking how much we really understand about people whose convictions we claim to admire in after-dinner speeches. For readers who want their history with teeth.