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Miller, Perry. "Puritans and Puritanism." Dictionary of American History, edited by Stanley I. Kutler, 3rd ed., vol. 6, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003, pp. 555-557. U.S. History in Context, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3401803470/UHIC?u=stev76221&xid=8fe7e322. Accessed 9 Nov. 2017.\

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Puritanism was first formulated as an ecclesiastical protest and was at the beginning devoted to attacking clerical vestments, the use of medieval ceremony, and the structure of the official hierarchy. Puritanism was thus a movement of religious protest, inspired by a driving zeal and an exalted religious devotion that its enemies called fanaticism but that to Puritans was an issue of life or death. This was connected with the social revolution of the seventeenth century and the struggle of a rising capitalist middle class against the absolutist state. It was a religious and social radicalism that in England proved incapable of maintaining unity within its own ranks and, during the 1650s, split into myriad sects and opinions. Puritanism was merely one of the forms in which the Calvinist version of Protestantism was carried to America. Puritanism can be said to have affected American life.

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Puritans were a group of people that lived in the 1500s who ,“wished to reform the Church of England beyond the limits established by Queen Ezilabeth I in order to ‘purify’ it of what they considered the remnants of Roman Catholicism. They wanted to modify the current church to how it was described in the New Testament. Puritans were very against the then current Church of England because they believed it didn’t follow the ways of the original faith of Catholicism. They wanted people to be acting completely in gods will and believed exactly what was originally thought to have been the first form of Catholicism. After 1603, Puritans and Parlamentarians became allies because of the dislike of royalty and their religion, and in the 1640s, they unleashed a civil war against Charles I.  When Puritans migrated to America, they carried Puritanism with them. They let their beliefs influence many political decisions and eventually was a large factor and in the separation of America from England.