Editorial Review, The Mayflower

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War
By: Nathanial Philbrick
From Sean, Marianne, and Lara’s Required Reading List

Few periods in American history are as clouded in mythology and romantic fantasy as the Pilgrim settlement of New England: The Mayflower, Plymouth Rock, the first Thanksgiving, Miles Standish, the Pokanoket Indians, Massasoit and his son Philip, Edward Winslow and his son Josiah, and the brave and heroic tales of Benjamin Church. What adventures and tales of courage, community, and war that took place in the 17th century, still have a profound influence on this country, because a small group of devout English Pilgrims fled their homeland in England and Holland to escape persecution transformed the New World forever.

From a perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become our most sacred national myth. This fifty-five year epic story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound tale of our country’s beginning. The Mayflower’s religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the Wampanoag’s, under the charismatic chief Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England would erupt into King Philip’s War, a savagely bloody conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them.

This book is required reading for all American History students and history buffs alike.