Across the pond

Across the pond: the colonization of America. This chapter begins by acknowledging the different strains of Protestantism that arrived on our colonial shores, but notes that the New England variety, Puritan and Calvinist-informed, was to have an outsized and enduring impact upon the development of the American charitable sector, and discusses the elements that made it unique in colonial America. From that beginning, the chapter covers the uniquely American trait of citizen action as noted by de Tocqueville, the impact that the First Amendment had, and the formation–again especially in New England–of citizen voluntary associations. The thread of further incremental advances in the secularization in charity is also continued. The chapter closes with a discussion of the pivotal Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward case, which established the independence of private, nongovernmental associations from the state governments that in many cases chartered them, or under whose laws they were incorporated.