When a tyrant is in charge who does not like the truth to be told and there is no freedom of speech, history gets skewed.
When good historians like today go back and read state records they usually find out that the people who supposedly wrote history at the time actually did it to make the tyrant look good. Meanwhile, anyone attempting to write the truth was attainted with treason and executed.
The Puritans were really an interesting bunch.
The Puritans are a favored target of the left for attacking Christians of today. They were strict in their religious beliefs but far from regressive in them.
For instance, Cotton Mather had a keen interest in science and often came into conflict with the church elders over his experiments. He was an early experimenter with Variolation which was a primitive form of vaccination. He argued that perhaps God wants us to use tools available to ease suffering and disease.
The Salem witch trials (which are wildly overblown) are blamed on religious fervor. Witches were a common superstition of the day. Even the local indians had adopted a belief in witches. While they all centered around puritans, that’s all there was here. The church was trying to stamp it out. Increase Mather wrote something along the lines of “The devil has indeed come to Salem Village but he comes not in the form of witches. Instead the devil came to Salem Village in the form of mortals who bear false witness”.