Studied and studied

“The Puritan’’ (1887), a famous statue in Springfield, Mass., by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Springfield is now best known for its new casino.

The Puritan’’ (1887), a famous statue in Springfield, Mass., by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Springfield is now best known for its new casino.

“So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there - fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many. ‘‘

— The late historian Edmund Morgan