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NARRATOR: By the 1620s, England's Puritans believed that the Anglican church was drifting too close to Roman Catholicism. King Charles I, who resented the Puritans' growing political power, began to persecute them. The Puritans began to look for a place where they could avoid persecution and build a community of their own. They believed that America might be that place.

MAN: People had come here for religious reasons, because they were objecting to the way life, and politics, and their church was changing back in England.

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NARRATOR: In 1629, a group of Puritan merchants established the Massachusetts Bay Company and obtained a charter for the land that is now Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Led by John Winthrop, a wealthy gentleman educated at Cambridge, 17 ships and about a thousand people docked in Boston in 1630.

Like all early settlements, the Massachusetts Bay Colony suffered from harsh weather, dwindling supplies, and Indian hostility. The colony thrived despite these hardships. The Puritan's strong religious beliefs made it the most stable of the English settlements in the New World. Still, there were divisions within the group. Some Puritans rebelled against the colony's strict rules.

MAN: Turned out, once they arrived in Massachusetts Bay, they didn't all agree 100% on exactly how things should be done. So the way they resolved some of their conflicts is by moving away and setting up new towns. And in 1636, a number of people left Massachusetts Bay and moved into what's now the area around Hartford in Connecticut. So very early on, Massachusetts started expanding and taking over other lands.

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NARRATOR: New Puritans kept arriving from England, taking the places of those who died or moved away. The Puritans valued hard work and celebrated material success as evidence of God's favor. Most believed they were part of a great and holy experiment, that the community they'd founded in Massachusetts would serve as a model for the rest of the world.

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