Document Based Question on the Colonies

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Document Based Question on the Colonies The 1600's were a time of global expansion, and the search for a new world where people could start their lives anew and have a say in the way their society was run. After Christopher Columbus's discovery of the Americas, countries began to send colonies to settle and establish a presence in the vast and unconquered land. The English sent some of the largest amounts of immigrants to the new world. One English group that came over to the new world was that of the Separatist Puritans. The puritans were in search of a new land were they would not be influenced by the outside world and could create a community centered entirely around their religion. After failing to successfully settle in the Netherlands, they decided to head over and try out the new world. The Puritans gathered in the Plymouth area of New England. Another group of English citizens that made the voyage to the New World were those sent by joint stock companies to farm and send a profit back to the motherland. They chose to settle in the Chesapeake region of the Americas where the soil was the richest. Over time these two groups whom were mainly comprised of people of English dissent, developed into their own unique and highly different societies with different values, due to the ideas that the groups were sent to the Americas for different purposes, they established different forms of government, and they featured contrasting econ...

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The vast differences that one can see between the New England Puritans and the Chesapeake colonists are due mainly to their different purposes for being in the new world, their different governments that they established, and the different economies that they built. One can see that the Puritan ideals, although often times fanatical, were usually based around a community and working together to create the perfect religious society, whereas the Chesapeake citizens were solely focused on themselves and prospering financially. These contrasts are what made these two groups of people from the same country evolve into such different societies and mold into the future societies of modern America.

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