What’s the Difference Between a Pilgrim and a Puritan?

[rangerrebew]

What’s the Difference Between a Pilgrim and a Puritan?
Rockwell Stensrud
On 11/26/15 at 10:19 AM
 

An elderly man I knew in Newport, Rhode Island, relished social gamesmanship. At dinner parties, after exhausting insignificant chatter, he would lean conspiratorially to his table companion and ask, “Can you tell me the difference between a Pilgrim and a Puritan?”

One night I eavesdropped when he posed the question. A benign smile filled his face as the woman to his right, a successful business executive, suddenly found herself in a predicament similar to that of the lepidopterist’s mounted butterfly.

Her eyes sought the ceiling. She squirmed and, after a moment, sputtered: “They’re both English, aren’t they? Big black hats with broad brims. Buckle shoes. Thanksgiving. Right?”

https://www.newsweek.com/whats-difference-between-pilgrim-and-puritan-397974

[The_Reader_David]

A bit incomplete the account given in the article.  It neglects the English Civil War in which the Puritans in Parliament overthrew the king and established a republic -- though the British later thought better (or worse) of the idea and restored the monarchy.  There even small bodies of "Massachusettsmen" who came back across the Atlantic to fight on the Parliamentary side.