Plymouth Colony

Story Stream

Why Not Celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Plymouth? December 09, 2020

On Saturday November 11, 1620, an ill-fitted cargo ship anchored off the coast of Cape Cod. On board were 102 quarrelsome and hungry passengers. Some 37 were religious dissidents, some servants, and a good many were would-be settlers contracted by th...

Pilgrims' Descendants Defend Their Ancestors November 24, 2020

Rebecca Locklear, 64, a 12th-generation Cape Codder, is a descendant of four of the families who arrived on the Mayflower in November 1620. She worries that society today, “is put into groups that are supposedly in a struggle against one another, rat...

The Mayflower, 400 Years On November 24, 2020

During the nineteenth century, historians looking for antecedents to the American Revolution made the Mayflower a sacred mascot, the flagship of freedom whose passengers escaped the English state. It bore the first English settlers to make a successf...

America Wasn't Founded on Slavery in 1619 November 13, 2020

In August 1619, a pirate ship, the White Lion, stopped at Jamestown and traded 20-some captive Africans for food. The Africans were treated as indentured servants and soon released.Fifteen months later, in November 1620, an English ship blown off cou...

Resisting the Leviathan November 13, 2020

In his famous Leviathan, the 17th-century theorist Thomas Hobbes argued that members of a political society should submit themselves to an absolute sovereign to preserve their lives and security. Without an absolute ruler, Hobbes warned, life would b...