![]() ![]() While validating some criticisms, asserts that the Pilgrims matter for more than their legend, and he deftly uses the history of Plymouth to explore ideas of liberty in the American colonies."-Nathanael Blake, National Review " They Knew They Were Pilgrims tells this story anew through an even-keeled and extensive history."-James Panero, New Criterion Critic's Notebook Instead of depicting the Pilgrims as otherworldly saints or extraordinary sinners, he tells how a variety of English settlers and Native peoples engaged in a contest for the meaning of American liberty. Turner moves beyond these familiar narratives in his sweeping and authoritative new history of Plymouth Colony. Drawing on original research using underutilized sources, John G. The Pilgrims’ definition of liberty was, in practice, very narrow. ![]() In it, the Pilgrims are religious zealots who persecuted dissenters and decimated Native peoples through warfare and by stealing their land. ![]() There exists, however, an alternative, more dispiriting version of their story. Understanding themselves as spiritual pilgrims, they left to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. asserts that the Pilgrims matter for more than their legend, and he deftly uses the history of Plymouth to explore ideas of liberty in the American colonies."-Nathanael Blake, National Review In 1620, separatists from the Church of England set sail across the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. Gullotta, Christianity Today " excellent new history. A welcome invitation to rediscover the Mayflower voyage and the founding of Plymouth Colony."-Daniel M. “Like a Lincoln fence rail piece, a tiny piece of Mount Vernon or even a piece of the Bastille, Plymouth Rock is part of who we are as a people,” says Bird."Informative, accessible, and compelling. The society ended up breaking the 400-pound rock into three pieces, and the museum acquired one in 1985. The organization came into possession of the rock in the 1920s it bought the Sandwich Street Harlow House, where the stone was being used as a doorstep. Much larger, weighing in at 100 pounds, the second hunk of rock was once part of a 400-pound portion owned by the Plymouth Antiquarian Society. 1850 4 1/2 o’clock p.m.” The artifact was donated to the museum in 1911 by the family of Gustavus Vasa Fox, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy. “He paints on it the exact moment of time in which he chips it from the ‘Mother Rock.’” The label on the small, four-inch by two-inch rock reads, “Broken from the Mother Rock by Mr. “The one that I like is painted with a little affidavit by Lewis Bradford, who is a descendent of William Bradford,” says Bird. The National Museum of American History has two pieces of Plymouth Rock in its collection. Meanwhile, over the course of the next century, people, wanting a stake in the history, slowly chipped away at the half of the rock still on shore. Actually, the upper half was transported to the town square where it was used to rile up New Englanders to want to gain independence from the Mother Country. (Bird considers McPhee’s story one of the best pieces written about the rock.) “There were those who feared and those who hoped that the break in the rock portended an irreversible rupture between England and the American colonies,” writes McPhee. “Like a bagel,” writes John McPhee in “Travels of the Rock,” a story that appeared in the New Yorker in 1990. In 1774, Plymouth Rock was split, horizontally, into two pieces. We choose these moments, and these things become invested with values that continue to speak to us today.” “To possess a piece of it is to look at a historical moment in terms of image making and imagery. “It is important because of what people have turned it into,” says Larry Bird, a curator in the National Museum of American History’s division of political history. Ever since, Plymouth Rock has been an object of reverence, as a symbol of the founding of a new nation. It wasn’t until 1741, when a wharf was to be built over it, that 94-year-old Thomas Faunce, a town record keeper and the son of a pilgrim who arrived in Plymouth in 1623, reported the rock’s significance. ![]() In fact, the rock went unidentified for 121 years. Yet, there is no mention of the granite stone in the two surviving firsthand accounts of the founding of the colony-Bradford’s famous manuscript Of Plymouth Plantation and Edward Winslow’s writings published in a document called “Mourt’s Relation.” Plymouth Rock, located on the shore of Plymouth Harbor in Massachusetts, is reputed to be the very spot where William Bradford, an early governor of Plymouth colony, and other Pilgrims first set foot on land in 1620. ![]()
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