Welcome back! The subjects covered in this unit was the settling of colonies.  Over the period from 1492-1630 we find the colonists settling in the new world.  The settlement of these colonies was inspired by many reasons, however, I will be only looking at the one reason that associates with freedom, which was primarily the freedom of religion. Many Europeans traveled to the new world to escape religious oppression from the church of England.  One group of people in particular despised the Church of England. The Puritans traveled from England to set up  a new and reformed Church.  Funny enough, the Puritans were very intolerant of other religions.  This led to the  banishment of a fellow known as roger Williams,  because the Puritans believed he was spreading "dangerous ideas".

This man Roger Williams is the very topic of the article I will analyze.  While banished, Williams built land from some native Indians and named it providence.  Here, him and a couple of his followers from Massachusetts set up a new government but with a new ideology.   That the church and state should be separated, which meant no mandatory service and no one religion to be in charge of providence.  This is now on of the first signs of religious freedom in what is soon to be America.  Roger Williams was only a 17th century Puritan preacher, but in all, he was on of the most remarkable men of the century shaping ideas into other great men such as John Locke and John Milton and an influencer on the architects of the constitution.









http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/god-government-and-roger-williams-big-idea-6291280/?no-ist

Freedom

Welcome to my blog.  Over the next 9 months I will be posting about how freedom played a significant role in American history.  As I go through American history with my class, I will be updating this blog analyzing how this theme correlates with the topics we are discussing in class.  I have chosen this theme because many people find associate America and freedom together and so I felt it would be easy.  I also feel that freedom is big part in American history making it an important topic to cover. 

I was asked to analyze an article on my topic by my teacher.  So the article was essentially trying to figure out the meaning of freedom.  In trying to explain this, they broke it up into three relevant groups.  Political and economic freedom, personal financial freedom, and freedom from the social matrix.   Political and economic freedom was described as not living in a jurisdiction that is occupied militarily or economically, and as a society that presents absolute freedom of speech from economic tyranny.  Personal financial freedom was described as being free to of externally imposed schedules, and having "the courage to act and venture out on our own".  To be free of social matrixes is to be free of influence of individual people and social conventions. to be free of a society in which constantly pressures its inhabitants to act or be a certain way.  Overall I believe that this article has a good definition of freedom.  It covers political freedom and social freedom which I feel are a very large portion of our government today.











http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/02/21/what-is-freedom/