Where Do We Belong?

A study of English settlers in America raises profound questions of identity.

Malcolm Gaskill | Published in 29 Oct 2014

Elizabeth Watson, daughter of a major investor in the Virginia Company, wears pearls and ostrich-feather designs - both symbols of the Americas - in a portrait by Robert Peake, 1615

A few years ago I was researching the East Anglian witch-hunt when people kept disappearing – people like a couple from Maldon in Essex, persistent puritan absentees from church. In 1638 officials of the archdeacon of Colchester gave up chasing them, scribbling against their names: ‘Gone to New England.’ In hundreds of English communities divided by politics and religion, individuals either drifted into the Civil War or they left. 

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