Word: puritanism
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...Romney's main political drawback is his self-righteousness. Any midwestern Puritan with inflexible religious convictions and a strong ego would be hard to stomach at times. Romney does not consider himself a politician and has belittled legislators who vote on party lines rather than on "what's right." Romney thinks he is right, and he needs to be right. His indecision on the major issues is more than political necessity; a fear of ever being wrong is ingrained deeply within...
Charles Ives--Yale man, insurance salesman, transcendentalist, composer--surely one of the most unusual figures in the history of music. Danbury Conn. was his musical matrix. In the solid German academic tradition, he was steeped in Handel, Bach, and Beethoven, as well as in the Puritan and Victorian hymns, minstrel tunes, and "sentimental drawing-room ballads" of late nineteenth-century America. Yet Ives was a composer far ahead of his time, employing radical devices such as polytonality, metrical modulation and tone clusters long before they appeared in the European musical spotlight...
...American colonists were barely ashore before they began casting about for ways to make their new homes attractive. In Puritan New England, crude portraits were being limned by anonymous painters as early as 1641; in Pennsylvania, settlers from the Palatinate were soon decorating birth certificates and family records with elaborate Fraktur flowers and birds, a practice derived from Gothic manuscripts...
Vincento, the Duke, can't bear to bring the law down on his citizens himself. So he appoints a deputy. Then he sticks around in disguise--he wants to see whether power will pervert the poor deputy. Angelo, the once-Puritan deputy, threatens Isabel: Either you sleep with me or I'll have your brother killed for sleeping with that girl. Isabel, the heroine, with majestic certitude: "More than our brother is our chastity." A cutup from an Ex bench: "Come off it, sistah...
Through his mother, too, Mark Howe was descended from a long line of Massachusetts men, including six Josiah Quincys, two of them Mayors of Boston and one a President of Harvard. Howe himself had a Bostonian's distaste for travel and the Puritan's taste for plainness and high standards for one's self...