My devotion to the topic of jello on this blog has obscured the fact that I do not like jello.

My interest in it is purely esthetic and/or nostalgic.

Neo, how can you say that about jello? 🙂

That being said, some Puritan immigration to New England did also occur after the 1660 Restoration, which would fit Gore Vidal’s hypothesis. A neighbor of mine in my NE hometown was an old Yankee. [There were still some around.] She made little mention of her ancestry, though I did find out that a street in a nearby city was named for one of her family. Decades later, some independent research led me to find out that the street was named for an ancestor that was one of the hanging judges responsible for the the death of Charles I. He had come to New England to escape- successfully it turned out- the wrath of King Charles II, the son of Charles I.

As religious dissenters- many of whom were Roundheads- were banned for centuries from Oxbridge, I can’t say that the Anglicans had clean hands either. Interesting that nearly all of the scientific and engineering advances in England from 1600-1850 came from religious dissenters, not from the Anglicans who were permitted affiliation with Oxbridge. Isaac Newton had to dissimulate his dissenting religious view in order to be at Oxbridge. Source: The Evolution of Man and Society, by C.D. Darlington.

There is no good jello.

“The Christians [i.e., the Puritans] who helped found this country didn’t leave Europe because they were being persecuted – – They were KICKED OUT, because they were persecuting everyone else!”
– Gore Vidal –

While I would take anything Gore Vidal ever said with a measure of salt, I think there is some validity to what he suggests here. The Puritans were behind the Roundheads, who were part of a pretty obnoxious time of Brit history.

made holy seeks holy
a power of truly
good and evil while we
seek to know more fully