The article discusses the religious polemic of the “New Lights” and “Old Lights” of the First Great Awakening era and the foundation of the College of New Jersey (present-day Princeton). The First Great Awakening swept all the British colonies in North America in the 1730–1750s and evolved concurrently with the Enlightenment movement. It had a significant impact on all the aspects of the life of the colonies — religion, politics, ideology, education. For the first time, the inhabitants of the colonies, who held various religious views, experienced general spiritual uplift, the strongest emotional shock. The colonies had not yet seen anything like the Great Awakening in the scale and degree of its influence on the society. It became the first movement in American history that had a truly intercolonial character and contributed to the formation of a single religious and ideological space in British America. The first American colleges were established exclusively as institutions for the preparation of priests, and therefore it is no coincidence that the theological debates between the “Old” and “New Lights” affected teachers and students at Harvard and Yale colleges. The sermons of the “New Lights” received a special response from the colonial youth. It is not surprising that many Harvard and Yale students were active participants in mass gatherings of thousands of the believers in the open. The spirit of rivalry, religious diversity and tolerance generated by the Great Awakening led to the establishment of a new type of colleges. Unlike Harvard and Yale, supported by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities of the colonies, none of the new colleges under the new conditions of religious pluralism received financial support from the colonial government. Secular principles in teaching intensified towards the end of the colonial period, while the link of colleges with any particular denomination weakened. Complete religious uniformity gave way to a more liberal spiritual policy, even at Harvard and Yale. Established in 1746, the College of New Jersey was a compromise between the supporters and opponents of the Great Awakening, various denominations, and ideas of religious and secular education.

The activity of the Soviet military mission in the US during the initial period of the Great Patriotic War becomes for the first time a subject of research both in domestic and foreign historiography. Having studied Russian and American archival materials, as well as American media publications, the author draws conclusions about the first results of the negotiations between high-ranking Soviet military officials and US political leaders. Although the scale of US aid to the Soviet Union from July 1941 to February 1942 was limited, and US supplies to the USSR at the beginning of WWII were mostly allocated through direct weapons procurement by providing loans to the Soviet Union rather than through the Lend-Lease program, it was then that the foundations were laid for an alliance between the USSR and the USA, the basic parameters of US economic aid were defined and the logistics of shipping cargo to the Soviet Union were established. The most important task of the Soviet military mission to the US was to convince American leaders that the Soviet military situation was not catastrophic and that the Red Army was combat-ready. The materials of the American periodicals provide important information about the struggle, which was taking place in summer 1941 both in the mass media and in the US political and military circles regarding rendering assistance to the USSR and shaping new image of the Soviet state — an ally in the joint fight, instead of an ideological opponent. The special attention in the article is given to the visit of A.K. Repin, the head of Soviet military mission in the USA, in February 1942, character of negotiations with the US president and decisions which have promoted realization of the Lend-Lease program for the Soviet Union.

The New England colonies are consistently perceived in American national consciousness and historical memory as the birthplace of the statehood and culture of the future United States. Coexistence with Indians has been an important component of life for English colonists since the foundation of settlements in New England. The cultures of the peoples of New England gradually integrated and one of them took a dominant position. G.V. Alexandrov’s monograph “Saints” and “Savages”: The Relationship between Colonists and the Indigenous Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century significantly contributes to understanding the nature and dynamics of ethno-cultural processes and interactions in the early history of the New England region. The novelty of contemporary research approaches implies the study of cooperation rather than conflict, the mutual economic, political and cultural influence of colonists and Indians on each other. Coexistence between Europeans and Indians during this period seems to have been much closer than our sources’ authors were willing to admit. During this time the Indians developed several mechanisms in an attempt to integrate themselves into the colonial community and to maintain at least part of their territorial, political and cultural independence from the British. In the early colonial decades, relations of the colonies with the Indians were almost equal. The causes and background of the two main colonial wars fought by English colonists with the New England Indians in the 17th century — the Pequot War and King Philip’s War — are presented in an entirely new light. The motives of the participants in the Pequot War were quite complex, involving political, economic and cultural aspects. Above all, contradictions between different Indian tribes and groups played a significant role in the development of the conflict, and the positions of many Indian groups might temporarily overlap with those of Europeans. King Philip’s war of 1675–1676, although anti-colonial in nature, stemmed more from the conflict between Indian tribes and changes in the regional economic system.

Jewish immigrants, who began to move into the New England colonies in the eighteenth century, attracted considerable interest from the Puritan population, the descendants of the founders of the colonies. They identified themselves with the ancient Jews and saw themselves as a new God chosen people who came to America with a special mission. The messianic spirit of the early settlers was accompanied by extreme intolerance towards those who did not share the Puritan doctrine, including the Jews. With the sweeping changes in British American colonial administrative system at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and consequent changes in the spiritual and intellectual climate of the New England colonies, there was a significant transformation in the worldview of the New England Puritans, particularly in questions of religious tolerance, interaction with other Protestant denominations, forms and methods of “conversion to the true faith”. It led leading Puritan clergymen to search for a way to restore their parishioners’ interest in religion. Millenarianism, the belief in the imminent advent of the millennial kingdom, was chosen for this purpose. One of the main Puritan theologians of his time, Cotton Mather, tried to put the ideas of Millenarianism into practice. He presented Millenarianism as an ecumenical project capable of uniting representatives of different denominations. The vision of the Puritan colonists as God’s chosen people shaped the special attitude towards the Jews. The article pays special attention to the theological works by Cotton Mather on the Jews of New England, in which his Millenarian views are vividly presented. Although his works, as well as his missionary activity among the Jews, did not bring the expected results, they enabled contacts between the Protestant clergy of America, Great Britain and continental Europe. The Puritan clergy in New England needed other ways to push for religious renewal and conversion, which would soon be actively pursued during the First “Great Awakening” of the second third of the eighteenth century.

The two major late-Soviet memorial policy projects, “Hero Cities” and “Golden Ring”, had many differences as well as points of intersection in terms of their emergence and development. Each of them appealed to a specific sample of regions, and the struggle for inclusion in the projects was fought at the union, republican, and regional levels. Both were “showcase” destinations for domestic and foreign tourism. E.M. Boltunova and G.S. Yegorova’s monograph “Territory and History: Late Soviet Projects Hero Cities and Golden Ring” makes a significant contribution to the study of two memorial projects of late Soviet society, which provided for it more than new places of memory and tourist routes: they formed alternative foundation myths that competed with the underlying Soviet narrative. The novelty of the monograph is the task of finding points of intersection in the history of seemingly completely unrelated projects: E.M. Boltunova and G.S. Yegorova’s work is about how society and power searched for and created new national meanings and reference points. The cities marked with the title of “Hero Cities” began to be gradually correlated in public historical memory with the territories of the most important battles of the Great Patriotic War, while a number of cities and regions that “fell out” of this project found themselves outside the program of state memorialization of the war 1941–1945. The issue of composition and boundaries also became one of the key aspects of the Golden Ring route development. Representatives of each region tried to justify as convincingly as possible the necessity to pay attention to this or that city or district when implementing the project, as the inclusion of a city in the route would allow the corresponding region to get additional resources for development. The authors of the monograph dwell in detail on the mutual influence of the projects at the level of narratives and visual components, as well as on the self-positioning of the territories included in the projects and their perception.