What Made Us Great

From The Puritan Gift (2009) by the Hopper brothers - - the elements that made our country what it is today:

These were: a conviction that the purpose of life, however vaguely conceived, was to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth; an aptitude for the exercise of mechanical skills; a moral outlook that subordinated the interests of the individual to the group; and an ability to assemble, galvanize and marshal financial, material, and human resources to a single purpose and on a massive, or a lesser, scale.

All of these elements were associated with the Bay Colony of Massachusetts Puritan origins.