Resources
- Plymouth ColonyIn September 1620, during the reign of King James I, a group of around 100 English men and women—many of them members of the English Separatist Church later known to history as the Pilgrims—set sail for the New World aboard the Mayflower.
- Plymouth Colony and the Beginnings of Liberty in America: A Q&A with NEH Public Scholar John TurnerNEH Public Scholar John Turner wants to change what you were taught in elementary school about the Mayflower Compact being a precedent for democracy and how the Pilgrims brought religious freedom to the New World.
- Plymouth RockLocated in Pilgrim Memorial State Park on the shore of Plymouth Harbor, this simple glacial erratic boulder has become a world famous symbol representing something different to each person who looks at it.
- Surviving the First Winter of the Plymouth Colony, 1620-1621William Bradford served as governor of the Plymouth Colony five times between its founding in 1620 and his death in 1657. His famed history of the colony, Of Plimouth Plantation, published the year before his death, recounts the hardship of the Pilgrims’ first winter and their early relations with the Patuxet Indians, especially the unique Squanto, who had just returned to his homeland after being kidnapped by an English seaman in 1614 and taken to England. Here we take up Bradford’s account of the colony’s founding after the adoption of the Mayflower Compact on November 11, 1620.
Pilgrims at Plymouth
A group of Puritan Separatists leave England aboard the Mayflower to settle a colony in America. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, they sign the Mayflower Compact, promising that all decisions of the new colony will be made by the majority.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEJF3b6izsQ
Perspectives
Mayflower
"Vivid and remarkably fresh...Philbrick has recast the Pilgrims for the ages."--The New York Times Book Review Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History New York Times Book Review Top Ten books of the Year With a new preface marking the 400th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower. How did America begin? That simple question launches the acclaimed author of In the Hurricane's Eye and Valiant Ambition on an extraordinary journey to understand the truth behind our most sacred national myth: the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. As Philbrick reveals in this electrifying history of the Pilgrims, the story of Plymouth Colony was a fifty-five year epic that began in peril and ended in war. New England erupted into a bloody conflict that nearly wiped out the English colonists and natives alike. These events shaped the existing communites and the country that would grow from them.
Making Haste from Babylon
Backed by privateering aristocrats, London merchants, and xenophobic politicians, they were sectarian religious radicals who lived double and treble lives: entrepreneurs as well as evangelicals, rebels as well as Christian idealists. Far from the storybook figures of American mythology, the Pilgrims were complex men and women, and Making Haste from Babylon tells their story in unrivaled depth. Within a decade of landing, and despite crisis and catastrophe, the Pilgrims built a thriving settlement at New Plymouth, based on trade in beaver fur, corn, and cattle, and in doing so they laid the foundations for Massachusetts, New England, and a new nation. Using a wealth of previously untapped or neglected evidence--from archives in England, Ireland, and the United States--British author Nick Bunker gives a vivid, strikingly original account of the Mayflower project. From the rural kingdom of James I to industrial Holland and the beaver ponds of Maine, he weaves a rich narrative combining religion, politics, money, science, and the sea. A meticulously researched, revelatory book that restores the potency of the Mayflower story by rediscovering the full international context of its time.
Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower
From their self-imposed exile in Holland to their perilous crossing of the Atlantic, to their first year in the new world, Desperate Crossing is the definitive story of how the Pilgrims came to live and prosper in an unfamiliar land.
The Pilgrim Chronicles
All Americans are familiar with the story of the Pilgrims--persecuted for their religion in the Old World, they crossed the ocean to settle in a wild and dangerous land. But for most of us, the story ends after their brutal first winter at Plymouth with a supposedly peaceful encounter with the Native Americans and a happy Thanksgiving. Now, through the vivid memoirs, letters, and personal accounts in The Pilgrim Chronicles, you will discover the full, compelling story of their anguished journey and heroic strength. Award-winning historian Rod Gragg brings the Pilgrims to life in this lavishly illustrated guide, filled with moving, eyewitness narratives. From their persecution in England and painful exile in Holland to their voyage across the Atlantic and their struggle to survive among the Indians in an untamed wilderness, Gragg takes you on the harrowing and inspiring journey of a people seeking religious freedom.
Of Plymouth Plantation
The most important and influential source of information about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, this landmark account was written between 1630 and 1647. It vividly documents the Pilgrims' adventures: their first stop in Holland, the harrowing transatlantic crossing aboard the Mayflower, the first harsh winter in the new colony, and the help from friendly Native Americans that saved their lives. No one was better equipped to report on the affairs of the Plymouth community than William Bradford. Revered for his patience, wisdom, and courage, Bradford was elected to the office of governor in 1621, and he continued to serve in that position for more than three decades. His memoirs of the colony remained virtually unknown until the nineteenth century. Lost during the American Revolution, they were discovered years later in London and published after a protracted legal battle. The current edition rendered into modern English and with an introduction by Harold Paget, remains among the most readable books from seventeenth-century America.
After the Mayflower
In 1621, Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoags of New England negotiated a treaty with Pilgrim settlers. A half-century later, as a brutal war flared between the English and a confederation of Indians, this diplomatic gamble seemed to have been a grave miscalculation.
Source: Kanopy