Free Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) by Kenneth C. Davis Page A

It became a national holiday and was moved to its November date by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
    While life did not magically improve after that first year, the Pilgrims carved out a decent existence and, through trade with the Indians, were able to repay their debts to the London backers and even to buy out the shares that these London merchants held. Their success helped inspire an entire wave of immigration to New England that came to be known as the Great Puritan migration. From 1629 to 1642, between 14,000 and 20,000 settlers left England for the West Indies and New England, and most of these were Anglican Puritans brought over by a new joint stock company called the Massachusetts Bay Company. They came because life in England under King Charles I had grown intolerable for Puritans. Though the newcomers demonstrated a startling capacity for fighting among themselves, usually over church matters, these squabbles led to the settlement and development of early New England.
Must Read: Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick.
     
    HIGHLIGHTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW ENGLAND
     
1629 Naumkeag, later called Salem, is founded to accept first wave of 1,000 Puritan settlers.
1630 John Winthrop, carrying the Massachusetts Bay Charter, arrives at Naumkeag and later establishes Boston, named after England’s great Puritan city. (In 1635, English High and Latin School, the first secondary school in America, is founded. The following year a college for the training of clergymen is founded at Cambridge and named Harvard after a benefactor in 1639.)
1634 Two hundred settlers, half of them Protestant, arrive at Chesapeake Bay and found St. Mary’s, in the new colony of Maryland, granted to Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who instructs his brother, the colony’s leader, to tolerate the Puritans. The so-called Catholic colony, ostensibly named for Charles I’s Queen Henrietta Maria, but in fact named to honor the Virgin Mary, will have a Protestant majority from the beginning.
1636 Reverend Thomas Hooker leads a group into Connecticut and founds Hartford; other Connecticut towns are soon founded.
1636 Roger Williams, a religious zealot banished from Boston by Governor Winthrop, founds Providence, Rhode Island, preaching radical notions of separation of church and state and paying Indians for land.
1636–1637 The Pequot War, the first major conflict, is fought between English colonists, joined by their Native American allies (the Mohegan and Narragansett), against the Pequot, a nation that was essentially wiped out in a brief but brutal war.
1638 Anne Hutchinson, banished from Boston for her heretical interpretations of sermons, which drew large, enthusiastic crowds, settles near Providence and starts Portsmouth. (Newport is founded about the same time.) In 1644, Rhode Island receives a royal colonial charter.
1638 New Haven founded.
1643 New England Confederation, a loose union to settle border disputes, is formed by Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay Colony.
    A MERICAN V OICES
N ATHANIEL M ORTON, 1634, witnessing Roger Williams’s demands for freedom of religion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony:
Whereupon [Williams] never came to the Church Assembly more, professing separation from them as Antichristian, and not only so, but he withdrew all private religious Communion from any that would hold Communion with the Church there, insomuch as he would not pray nor give thanks at meals with his own wife nor any of his family, because they went to the Church Assemblies.
The prudent Magistrates understanding, and seeing things grow more and more towards a general division and disturbance, after all other means used in vain, they passed a sentence of banishment against him out of the Massachusetts Colony, as against a disturber of the peace, both of the Church and Commonwealth. After which Mr. Williams sat down in a place called Providence . . . and was followed by many of the members of the Church of Salem, who did