A conspicuous feature of contemporary historical scholarship in the United States has been the resurgence of interest in the Reformation and a revival of scholarly concern with the Puritans of seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century America. The increased activity of Roman Catholicism in America has resulted in a heightened Protestant self-consciousness and may account in large measure for the revival of Reformation study, while the present straits of Anglo-Saxon culture and society have caused men to re-examine the major current of their heritage in an effort to understand from whence they came and whither they may be tending.