Public rituals have always held a vital place in American culture. By far the noisiest and most popular of these to emerge in the nation's early years was Independence Day. After a decade of fitful starts, the Fourth of July eclipsed local and regional patriotic observances to become the premier "American Jubilee." Celebrating the Fourth provides a history of this holiday and explores its role in shaping a national identity and consciousness in three cities - Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia - during the first fifty years of the American republic. Independence Day celebrations...

John Cotton Jr. (1639-1699) was the second son of one of the most famous clergymen of New England's founding generation. At the age of twenty-two, already the pastor of the church in Wethersfield, Connecticut, he lost his ministry as a result of a sexual scandal. Disgraced and jobless, Cotton moved his family to distant Martha's Vineyard to start anew as a missionary to the Indians. Within a few years, Cotton had managed to rehabilitate his reputation, and he accepted a call to the church in Plymouth. He kept the Plymouth pulpit for nearly thirty years before losing it, once again to...