Author: Wesley Reynolds

Wesley Reynolds

Wesley Reynolds is the Director of the Wilbur Fellows Program at the Russell Kirk Center. He also teaches at Northwood University and has previously worked in public policy with the Mackinac Center. Reynolds is the author of Coffeehouse Culture in the Atlantic World, 1650-1789 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), as well as other articles and reviews.

A Return to Rootedness

It was not just that the Pilgrims who came to our shores were too poor to afford the glitz and glamor of a contemporary popular culture which passes as truly “American” today, but rather that the Pilgrims came to America to establish an agrarian and even pastoral existence which would be purified of Europe’s mercantilism. Their more localized view of property ownership and subsidiarity flies in the face of both modern consumeristic trends and socialistic humanitarianism.