by the early 18th century the English colonies in the new world had really overtaken those of both France and of Spain and English America as it turned out ended up becoming by the early 18th century the most populous prosperous and the most powerful of all of the European Empires because English America became this I think it's a worthwhile effort to kind of dive deeper into some of the more specific uh significant and sometimes of course interesting English colonies and so that'll be our objective for this lecture okay so having covered the settlement of Virginia will now turn to the last of the Chesapeake colonies that we'll discuss and that is the settlement or the colony um of Maryland the colony of Maryland and the settlement Maryland is an interesting story that is heavily involves religion especially protestantism and Catholicism but the the colony of Maryland wasn't established until 1634 which was 10 years right after Virginia had become a royal colony now the the colony of Maryland was for in this land of over 12 million acres of land right was initially granted by the king of England to a gentleman by the name of Sir George Calvert who was a english-era stock receiving he was the first Baron of Baltimore um Calvert was close friends with the king at the time who was King Charles the first uh they were both Catholics um Calvert was trusted by King Charles at a time when most of the government officials in England were Protestant and were not very um close friends or close allies of the king so a a Catholic like Calvert would have been seen by the Catholic King as a uh a willing Ally and so they were they were close uh and and the King considered him to be a favorite of his at court now the land that was granted to Calvert by King Charles the first was going to be named by Calvert after King Charles's wife Henrietta Maria who was known throughout England as Queen Mary hence the name the colony of Maryland she was the husband of course of or she was the wife of the co of the king at the time King Charles the first so let's talk a little bit about what this was going to be like as a colony this colony was going to be used by Calvert to be kind of a safe haven for Catholics who were becoming heavily persecuted in Protestant England even though their King King Charles the first was a Catholic now the land grant that got given to Calvert to settle in the new world just north of Virginia uh was something that Calvert would never get to see come to fruition he died soon after this land was granted to him um but as it is in English aristocracy the title and the nobility just passes to the eldest son and so the grant that was given by King Charles the first uh would then be handed over to Calvert's first son cecilius Calvert who became the second Baron of Baltimore and it would be this Baron of Baltimore it would be this Calvert that would actually settle and create the colony of Maryland so let's talk about Maryland a little bit and talk about Calvert's vision for it Calvert wanted Marilyn to be like his father had wanted it to be a refuge for English Catholics who were becoming increasingly persecuted in Protestant England but he also wanted the colony to become profitable right I mean everybody wants to make money why not and So to avoid uh and so to to make the The Colony profitable he knew that he would need to avoid antagonizing Protestants uh both Protestants that would go to the Colony as well as Protestants back home a Catholic in charge of a colony was going to raise suspicions among Catholics or among Protestants both in England and in the colony so he wanted this colony to be a refuge for English Catholics but he also wanted us to be profitable and to do all of that he would need to then avoid the avoid antagonizing Protestants and so to do that he instructed his brother who actually was here at the colony as well to uh tell all the Catholic priests and all of the Catholic colonists right like keep your Catholicism in the closet right don't don't don't make it over don't don't Worship in public you know keep it all private um as a way to just kind of not not make the colony about religion so the first settlement that the uh that Calvert would establish would be Saint Mary's right there in 1634 right along the banks of the Chesapeake River not far from Jamestown and uh Saint Mary's is near the mouth of the Potomac River uh uh now Calvert wanted to avoid a lot of the mistakes that were made at Jamestown so when he recruited people to go to Maryland and start this Colony uh he recruited more committed people right people that knew what they were doing he he made up families um intending to stay rather than just single men that were going there for quick profits right he wanted it to be different than than Virginia in addition he also didn't want uh uh Maryland to become just a scattered Farm uh Community which would be vulnerable to Indian attacks and things like that and he also wanted Maryland's um agriculture to be much more Diversified uh instead of just growing tobacco like Virginia did uh he wanted to avoid extremes of economic wealth and poverty that had developed in colonial Virginia and so to do that yeah I'll give you an example how he proposed to do that he actually would provide 100 acres to every single adult and 50 more acres to any child of that adult so he was uh not not looking to create some uh out of whack social cast um in spite of those best efforts Maryland developed along the same lines of Virginia it it did have a bit of a more Diversified agricultural economy however the principal cash crop that developed in Maryland was still going to be tobacco the area of the Chesapeake Bay was just perfectly suited for the cultivation of tobacco as we saw happening in Virginia um and so tobacco became a very big cash crop for Maryland in spite of Calvert's wishes that it wouldn't but it wasn't the only cash crop that ended up making Maryland a very successful Colony corn was also cultivated in the colonies and it became a very profitable cash crop for marylanders and then finally another cash crop here was Indigo the cultivation of indigo was a very big business that emerged in the Chesapeake Bay and in the colony of Maryland because with this Indigo you could make blue dye so Calvert got a little bit of his wish you know he did have a bit of a diversified economy but it still was principally revolving around tobacco until to a lesser extent corn and to a lesser extent indigo now in addition to all of these cash crops the geography of this colony was just ripe to be exploited and of course what I'm talking about here is that it's a colony that has a long coastline and it has all of these inlets that pop into uh you know pretty far inland along rivers and and Coastal inlets and so there wouldn't be a need in the Maryland colony to create long roads that would have to be maintained all the cultivation of corn and tobacco and indigo could be just easily loaded onto ships that could travel up these waterways and up these inlets and so this Coastline and the long coastline uh when you put it together with the amount of cash crops that that the colony had it just it produced a very very successful colony and as it turns out the only thing that could rail the success of this colony could be religion and religion was a big problem in the colony of Maryland now the charter that was given to Calvert by King Charles the first stipulated that uh he would be in charge of making laws and and he desperately wanted to attract when in 1642 an English Civil War broke out back home in which King Charles the first the Catholic King was overthrown later beheaded in 1649 by Protestant forces led by Parliament and led by uh the guy that took over for Charles the first Oliver Cromwell Lord protector of England uh this revolution this English Civil War is sometimes called the Puritan Revolution Cromwell was a hardcore Anglican hardcore Protestant and the Puritans saw in the Catholics just their mortal enemy and the reason they were called Puritans is they thought the Catholic or they thought the English church still had too much Catholicism in it too much Catholic dogma still in it and they wanted to purify it of it so Puritans were just mortal enemies of Catholics and now that the uh um uh Catholic King has been overthrown and beheaded and a Protestant Administration in Oliver Cromwell has been established this greatly worried Cecil Captain Cecilia Calvert so here's what he tried to do to prevent the uh the the new Lord protector of England from from interfering in the colonies uh uh day-to-day operations he drafted and implemented that was known as the Toleration Act of 1649. now what made this revolutionary Was Not only was he acknowledging Puritan control and the Puritan victory over King Charles first but what made it truly revolutionary was that this law this Toleration Act that was that was implemented by Calvert in Maryland was going to welcome all Christians of all denominations so long as you were Christian if you were an atheist then you would actually be you would actually be killed now this is pretty revolutionary for the time period you didn't see a lot of this in fact he saw none of this at the time and so this Toleration Act was done by Calvert to try to kind of uh not to to not draw the ire of Cromwell uh but in spite of his efforts it wasn't enough and so with Cromwell in charge he's going to start putting in positions of control in Maryland Protestants and this hope right that Maryland would become this colony of Catholic uh refugees is just dashed once Cromwell comes to power uh in fact in 1654 Cromwell rescinds the Toleration Act uh he strips Catholic colonists uh in Maryland of their voting rights and he ends up denying them the right to worship and so the once persecuted Puritans right of England are now in a position to begin uh being persecutors themselves and they begin heavily persecuting the Catholics not only in England but in Maryland so what do we take away from the settlement of Maryland well it was a very successful colony because of its uh uh geography and because of its cash crops and and we're we're not for that success right in growing tobacco and indigo and corn Maryland probably would have disintegrated because of the religious conflict that was taking place in England which was having the effect of spilling over into the colony itself and so in 1692 having covered the settlement of the Chesapeake colonies or at least the ones we want to focus on in terms of Virginia and Maryland let's turn our attention now to the settlement of the New England colonies now the New England colonies or the term New England refers to the colonies that on that map there way up North uh that are in yellow we're talking about the colonies then of Massachusetts New Hampshire uh Rhode Island and Connecticut now the Maine was not originally a colony of England it became a state later on in the 1820s so the New England colonies were comprised then of New Hampshire Massachusetts Bay Rhode Island and Connecticut now we're not going to talk about all of them we're just going to talk about one small colony called Plymouth and then the two other uh important colonies from New England Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island but we'll start with Plymouth thank you the story of the Plymouth Colony is a story that if if you grew up in the United States and went through the public education system you're probably familiar with because the Plymouth Colony was the colony that was established by a group called the pilgrims and around Thanksgiving time and I remember in elementary school were always making arts and crafts of turkeys and Pilgrim hats and pilgrims shoes and buckles and all that good stuff so if you're if the Plymouth Colony sounds familiar to you in that regard that's why um the thing about the Plymouth Colony is that in spite of all of this Focus that Americans give it it's a rather insignificant colony in terms of the development of the English colonies and even later the development of the United States and so you may be wondering why are we even talking about it well we're talking about it because I think Americans are fascinated by the group that settled this colony and the reasons that they did it and I think Americans hold them still today in very high regard for making the decisions they made but I I do want to be up front and say that this colony in terms of its impact on the development of the United States is is rather minimal it didn't last very long and it really didn't have much impact on the social economic or political development of the colonies and later the United States but it's a famous Colony it's settled by famous people so let's talk about them who are these people that settled this the Plymouth Colony well uh we know them as the pilgrims but they were more commonly referred to uh as Puritan separatists uh so let me explain we're going to be talking obviously a lot about religious Strife that took place here we already did with Maryland um and the Puritans were like these really Orthodox and really dogmatic uh Protestants they were incredibly anti-catholic um and the Puritan Movement that kind of took over in England uh created a lot of strife not only between Protestants and Catholics but also within protestantism itself because you had kind of factions that disagreed with each other about how they should worship and when they should worship and you know uh and then there were others that thought well you know you're you're too dogmatic or too Catholic so on and so forth now why were the pilgrims called Puritan separatists well most Puritans didn't want to break from the Protestant Church of England uh most of them just kind of wanted to kind of Reform it from within and we're going to learn more about those uh that group when we talk about the Massachusetts Bay Colony but the pilgrims were a group that wanted to separate completely from the church of England and break from its control uh hence the name Puritan separatists uh and as you can imagine the pure the pilgrims you know they weren't a very big faction of puritanism uh in England so they were a pretty heavily persecuted Anglican sect um they didn't want to Worship in Anglican churches they wanted to worship their own churches and they didn't want priests or Bishops to govern their congregations they kind of thought that the leaders of their congregation should come from within their groups and so that just didn't fit in with the traditional uh Puritan ideals and so they were a heavily persecuted uh group of people um so much so that they actually left England and went to Holland for a while but they were of course persecuted there and then returned to England uh now this group ended up settling the ma the Plymouth Colony because uh they were looking to leave England completely and just leave it all behind and establish their own colony where they could worship them where they want to worship uh and and and live the way they wanted to live uh and so ultimately what they did is they took up an offer uh took up an offer from a joint stock company called the Plymouth Company who wanted to establish another colony in the Chesapeake Bay area near Maryland near Virginia uh as a money-making Venture and so these Puritan separatists these pilgrims they took up an offer from this company to establish that colony in order to of course exploit the natural resources of the Chesapeake Bay and of course they were instructed to establish this Colony uh near Jamestown now they took up this offer in 1620. um and that's also the year they left England now they left England with 100 men women and children uh but not all of the people that left in this initial wave were pilgrims those that were pilgrims they called themselves Saints the others that were traveling with them to establish this colony who weren't pilgrims they were called by the pilgrims strangers right and this is a very famous painting you see here this is called the embarkation of the pilgrims it's by Robert Ware who painted it in the 1850s the reason this is such a famous painting is this painting hangs in the Rotunda of the U.S Capitol Building among many of the other famous paintings we'll see in this course so in 1620 these this group of 100 men women and children they all boarded onto a single Naval vessel called the mayflower this is of course not the actual Mayflower this is a reproduction of it that would be amazing if it still survived and it was a heart an arduous course an arduous journey across the Pacific I'm sorry not the Pacific across the Atlantic and his fate would have it they actually got blown off course on their way across the Atlantic and that caused them to land much further north uh than the Chesapeake Bay much further north than Virginia where they were originally supposed to land uh and they actually made landfall way up here in what will become the New England settlements they landed at a place called uh Province Providence town which was a small kind of trading Outpost you can see on this map it's like right there on the tip of that Peninsula stretching out into Cape Cod here's a bigger picture of it and they made landfall there in November of 1620 and they realized immediately that they were lost um but rather than getting back on board the ship and traveling around trying to find the Chesapeake Bay and trying to find where they're supposed to start their colony well the pilgrims just use this as an opportunity they believe this was divine intervention and they just decided to established the colony right there um right there in that area now before they traveled from Providence or Province Town over to the mainland on board the Mayflower they they made an agreement with each other that became famously known as the Mayflower Compact uh and the reason they did this is that some of the people on board the ship objected yeah to the idea of starting a new colony because they didn't actually have a governing Charter which they needed in order to do that their Charter was back in England and it stipulated that they were to start a colony that would be governed in the Chesapeake Bay Area so some of them objected to all of this because there was no Charter for the colony they were going to establish therefore there were no rules there were no laws there was no form of government how are these people going to survive and so that was the point then of the Mayflower Compact it was essentially the the people on board this ship the Saints and the strangers they drew up a document uh that details the sort of government they were going to have and the sort of laws they were going to have that they would all agree then to live under now a lot of people will refer to the Mayflower Compact that's kind of democracy in action uh and a very early form of the democratic impulse um in the colonies but that's not really what it was the the the pilgrims weren't you know they weren't Thomas Jefferson and they weren't John Locke and they weren't Montesquieu these these were not political philosophers were creating something new here they essentially realized they needed some laws they needed a form of government if they were going to create a new colony and so they essentially just drew up a a system of uh uh laws and and ordinances that they would agree to live under and another thing that made this not really democracy in action is some uh people like to refer to it as uh in these laws that they and in this compact it was only the pilgrims uh that would be able to be a member of the government and to be able to vote so it's not really democracy in action at all instead it was just an agreement that uh Hey when we make uh landfall in the mainland we're going to live under these laws like we're not going to kill each other and we're not going to uh you know uh uh rape women and we're not going to steal from each other just basic basic laws um now what else about them so they finally uh about a month after uh Landing in Provincetown uh finally made their way to the mainland they made landfall in December of 18 or 1620 uh they landed along the interior Coastline of uh what is today Massachusetts and you can actually go there uh this is another famous painting depicting The Landing from Provincetown uh but they made landfall along the interior Coastline of the uh of what is today Massachusetts and you can actually go to the spot there uh in Massachusetts they of course landed at what was called Plymouth Rock um and there's a nice museum nearby and there's a nice uh you know kind of protecting thing of the uh that protects the area in which they landed and uh of course people always wonder is there an actual rock yeah there is then there it is um that's the actual rock uh that they use this kind of a navigational uh um marker and so you can go there and you can see where they actually landed it's all pretty neat uh it can be a bit hokey uh but you know it is a piece of History so it's it's kind of worth checking out now one more a couple more things about the pilgrims now the pilgrims like I mentioned earlier they're very synonymous with Thanksgiving uh here in the United States in fact uh people have always claimed that they held the first Thanksgiving in the United States uh but that's not really true um the Thanksgiving that the pilgrims had was simply a Harvest Festival and uh Harvest festivals you know the Spanish were doing this in the new world as as early as the 1500s Native Americans had festivals like this every single year and they'd been in the uh in North America for thousands of years so they didn't really have the first Thanksgiving but they did have a Thanksgiving um but it wasn't the first um one a problem with this image of the first Thanksgiving is it kind of leads Americans to think that this colony was a really great Colony right from the beginning Bountiful prosperous but that really wasn't the case um life in this Colony especially early on was very very harsh um they had their own starving time just like the Virginia uh or Jamestown colonists had and a lot of these pilgrims died of malnutrition died of uh of starvation uh so it wasn't just this hunky-dory beautiful prosperous time um especially early on in the colony they actually had to steal corn from Native Americans in order to survive and what allowed them to actually survive this starving time was eventually a Native American in the area uh taught the colonists how to grow this corn um and we'll see you know I don't know if any of y'all remember the name of this Native American that taught the pilgrims how to grow corn uh but he is an interesting figure from the colonial uh history but his name was Squanto uh he was the one that taught the colonist how to grow this corn um that's all I really want to say about the Plymouth Colony I just want to say I just want to kind of conclude by just saying that the The Colony just it's just not really that important um it doesn't have really any impact on the social economic or political development of the United States uh by the 1630s it was clear this colony was an absolute failure uh and eventually in 1691 it just got kind of absorbed into the larger colony of Massachusetts Bay which we're going to talk about next and so the reason but but I but I think the colonies worth remembering I think it's worth knowing kind of a general history of the colony because Americans you know they hold the pilgrims in high regard and I think they do and still do today because they were a group that was persecuted and rather than live under that persecution uh in their own way they rebelled right they left that persecution behind they said I'm not going to deal with it I'm going to move to some place where I can live the way I want to live and I think that's why Americans hold them in high regard but aside from that they're a rather insignificant colony and that's why we didn't spend much time on them continuing on with our uh investigation into the settlement of the New England colonies we're going to turn our attention now uh to the most important of the New England colonies uh it was known as the Massachusetts Bay Colony uh the Plymouth Colony which we just got done looking at it's its population never Rose above 7 000 people making it very small uh and as we learned very insignificant but after just 10 years of the Plymouth colonies existence it was eventually overshadowed and overtaken um by its much larger neighbor the Massachusetts Bay Colony and this Colony as it turns out was not only larger than Plymouth not only more prosperous than Plymouth but as it turns out had a dramatic effect on the development of not only the colonies but eventually the United States so let's talk for a second about the colony and how it was established uh this colony was established by a joint stock company known as the Massachusetts Bay Company it was founded in 1629 this is its Great Seal you see on the screen now the joint stock company uh called Massachusetts Bay this was actually a company that was owned by a religious group uh that were known as congregationalist Puritans so I want to talk to you a little bit about who these people are uh to kind of set up why they're going to establish not only this company but also within a colony so the congregationalist Puritans uh War again they were a faction of the Puritan Movement and of protestantism in England um and these were unlike the pilgrims the congregationalist Puritans didn't want to separate from the church of England um but they did want to reform it and specifically the big four reform they wanted is they they wanted their own congregations to govern themselves uh whereas in England in the Church of England every church was given was appointed a priest or a bishop by the king well so the point behind their name then is that they kind of wanted their little congregations localized small congregations to be governed by themselves to be their leadership chose from within uh and this of course made them a target for a lot of uh the political power in England because well to the priests and the Bishops that were appointed by the King was one way in which the king could kind of keep tabs on everything and keep kind of control of everything and they believed that then meant that the King was very pope-like uh he was a lot like the pope which is the head of the church uh which is the head of the Catholic church and they thought that that was a bit too Catholic uh and that that needed to be purged from the Protestant Faith especially in England it needed to be purged from the church of England and so their point was that they wanted to purify the church with from within uh and kind of Purge itself purify itself of these remaining Catholic dogmas uh that were present within the Church of England now the group was led by uh this gentleman here his name is John Winthrop uh he was a wealthy lawyer and eventually became the governor of this Colony that will establish but he was the central figure really in in the Massachusetts Bay company's establishment because uh Not only was he the leader of this um congregationalist Puritans uh but that then made him the leader of this joint stock company that's going to establish this colony so what was then the point behind this Colony well unlike the pilgrims who were going to create a colony and then um you know never go back to England they're just breaking completely from England that's not what went through up in the congregation those Puritans wanted to do they wanted to establish a colony in the New World to act as John Winthrop said a city on a hill which is from a sermon he gave and really this was the whole point behind the colony uh this concept of a city on a hill and this was the concept that these Puritans had a job to do these congregations was Puritans and their job was to go into the Wilderness of North America establish a colony but establish it in a way that has a society that reflects the way they believed England should be and so their job then they saw themselves as creating a city on a hill which is kind of to be seen by everyone far and wide but specifically England now I don't physically mean that England would be able to see this city on a hill it's it's a concept and a very powerful one it implies that what the Puritans are going to do here then is really a a mission by God to establish a colony creating a model Society uh on a Hilltop quote-unquote uh so that England would take take notice of it and reform itself along the same lines it might sound like a hair brain idea but it was a very powerful concept and actually Still Remains a very powerful concept today in the United States more on that a little bit but this was the whole point behind the colony was this concept of creating a city on a hill um and so the colony was established for religious reasons not really for money-making reasons although it became prosperous it was really established along the lines of religious um hoping to instigate religious reform back in England now the the initial settlers that created the colony landed at a small Trading Post uh called Salem you could see it on on the map there in that red area uh that that Trading Post has been there for a while but they eventually moved into the mouth of the Charles River and at the mouth of the Charles River they established their initial settlement that they called Boston uh and if anyone's ever been there this this is an old old town uh The Colony that they was that they established uh was very self-governing uh the company when it was granted a charter which Allowed by the king um and you had to have a charter I think I've already mentioned this to create a colony um all those Charters that were granted by the king they had to stay in England which meant then that the colonies uh home offices were in England uh and and the reason the king required that is that he could kind of keep tabs on you um you were more easily manipulated and controlled if that was the case but John Winthrop being a good smart lawyer he took advantage of a loophole that was within the king's Charter to create this Colony uh he took advantage of that loophole and he took the charter with him which meant the home offices of the colony would not be in England they would be over there in in North America so that allowed them the colony to become uh self-governing pretty much without any influence from England um and the government they created is they they created a a representative legislature that was called the Massachusetts General Court um this is uh the old state house um in Boston uh this is where that that Court met uh it still was in operation today just not inside that house I mean the Massachusetts general court is also is today the Massachusetts state legislature so it's it's one of the oldest self-governing bodies in the English colonies and so they established it in 1630 but unlike today the only people uh that could be a member of the government and the only people that could really vote for people in this government uh is he they initially had to be shareholders of the company or they had to be property holders um now over time in this Colony that principal requirement for membership uh simply became are you a member of the Puritan Church which leads me to a larger discussion about a misconception about this colony um this was a group the the congregation is Puritans this was a group that did not believe in the separation of church and state uh they just didn't believe in it um you know they believed in Law and Order uh and they despised democracy for the most part um they're a very stubborn and hyper-conservative uh group um so religion they argued was something uh that should be the job of government uh because uh religion as they say as they said was the the path to social stability uh so this was not a group that established the idea of separation of church and state it's a misconception about them uh there's also a misconception about them is that they were created a religiously tolerant society and that's not true either they didn't believe in religious freedom um they persecuted anyone that wasn't a member of the Puritan church or they persecuted anyone that spoke out against the church or challenged uh the church's established Authority you know for example uh there was a Puritan Woman by the name of Ann Hutchinson who uh was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because she was giving additional sermons in her home after church uh and she was seen as kind of twisting what the Puritan ministers were saying in church and giving her students or her flock kind of a a non non-puritan kind of teaching uh they just thought she was not teaching anything correctly but really what the problem was was she was a woman in a hyper-conservative religious uh sect uh you know acting as a leader and so she was arrested she was uh convicted of of here's you know heresy and uh she got banished from The Colony this happened to a lot of people because this was not a religiously tolerant uh Society if you if you didn't believe in the Hallmarks of the Puritan Church um you were out I mean they would just banish you from the colony and this happened to a lot of people and Anne Hutchinson's one of them in a second we'll talk about another very famous one was banished uh so this was not a colony that believed in religious freedom it was not a colony that believed in separation of church and state but it also was um in spite of all of its religious uh angles this was a very prosperous Colony uh an economic success to be sure and I want to just briefly kind of mention some some of the things that made this Colony so wealthy and prosperous and the first was of course shipbuilding um The Forest of the New England area I mean the the trees there forget the name of them they're just perfectly suited for the construction of 17th uh an 18th century Naval vessels uh and a very thriving shipbuilding industry emerged in the New England colonies especially there in Massachusetts Bay which of course created a very thriving and prosperous Lumber industry um and so this New England building was a huge huge economic boom for the colony which made it very prosperous and wealthy and as I mentioned so too was Lumber as you can imagine you know the the lumber in the street to necessitate and fulfill all the demands of all these Naval vessels that we built and by the way uh very quickly the naval vessels created in the New England colonies were some of the most sought after Naval vessels uh in not only the English Empire but uh and sometimes in the Spanish and the French as well so a very prosperous industry and so too was the lumber and then one more thing that made it very prosperous was wheat wheat was very uh is synonymous with the Massachusetts area this is what a lot of the farmers will grow and the reason this is important is that wheat you know has a lot of carbohydrates which would give a lot of people a lot of energy and that energy would be translated into just you know being prosperous being active um it's uh it's the way it works so that's the Massachusetts Bay Colony you know established for religious reasons um but different of course than the pilgrims um it's an economic success um but why is it important well I want to go back to the the concept of a city on a hill uh this idea that a colony could act as a model for the rest or for England or for the rest of the world um it's a very powerful concept that we still see even today in the United States a lot of your national leaders will talk about this uh they'll they'll mention things Concepts that are similar to this in their speeches uh and this concept of the United States could be a city on a hill right the country that we live in the whole country being a city on the hill uh this was a concept that has been kind of reinforced over the generations it was Abraham Lincoln I think really that that made the first argument that this country could be something to the world and that was why the Civil War and the union winning was so important to Lincoln is because the the country and the idea that needed to survive uh because Lincoln believed it was a it was it meant something for the world and that concept that then of course was reinforced in the 20th century during um uh during the Cold War uh and and even today uh there are uh former presidents that bring up this imagery uh so it's a very powerful concept and it's kind of been taken over by uh people that like to argue that this country has a special mission in the world uh and that we are a city on a hill uh so it's from a conceptual and principle uh approach the settlement of Massachusetts Bay has an effect that on the development of the United States but in terms of the colonies the Massachusetts Bay Colony is also important because it ended up spawning a whole bunch of other colonies uh and of course uh New England uh Connecticut and Rhode Island um the Massachusetts Bay was like the first colony and then everybody kind of spread out from there and so it ended up spawning all of the New England colonies uh and then the final reason I think the Massachusetts Bay Colony has an effect on the development of the colonies is that because of how prosperous it became um by the time of the American Revolution it was second only to Virginia in terms of power and wealth and influence um and that allowed then Massachusetts Bay to have a heavy role in the American Revolution a lot of the leadership came from Virginia a lot of the leadership of the American Revolution came from the Massachusetts Bay Colony that's why I think they're worth knowing okay so I think that's enough for this lecture um we're going to cover the rest of these major interesting English colonies in the second half of this lecture uh but we'll just go ahead and put a pin in this one right now