Early American Rebels

Like her previous work, Noeleen McIlvenna's Early American Rebels views the seventeenth-century political history of British North America through the lens of the English Civil Wars (1642–1651). Here she focuses on the Chesapeake Bay region, especially the colony of Maryland, where the Calvert family held sway for generations thanks to the charter King Charles I granted them in 1632. Staunch royalists, the Calverts were also Catholics, favoring their co-religionists economically and politically but also tolerating Protestant settlers. The outbreak of the First Civil War in 1642 emboldened Maryland's dissidents; aligning themselves with English parliamentarians, they propagated the “dangerous democratic ideas” that the Calverts and other royalists decried (p. 22). The heart of Early American Rebels consists of chapter-length treatments of three rebellions, led successively by Richard Ingle, Josias Fendall, and John Jenkins, between the 1640s and the 1670s. Although the insurgents resented various taxes and policies regarding trade with the

Charter · Chesapeake bay · Civil rights · Democracy · Economic history · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Spanish Civil War · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law