Lunch & Learn: The Mayflower Compact: Four Hundred Years of Experimentation

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Historian Pauline Meier characterized our Nation’s founding documents as American Scripture. Certainly, the Mayflower Compact takes chronological priority in the sacred texts of America’s civil religion. In the absence of a royal charter and faced with mounting shipboard dissension because the Mayflower landed north of the colony’s legal destination in Northern Virginia, key passengers initiated the organization of a government and legal structure by a “combination” in which the necessity of forming a “civil body politic” was set forth.

Plymouth Colony was a place of political creativity and improvisation in the face of challenges and opportunities. It was a birthplace of self-government in the British Atlantic World and played a critical role in this country’s constitutional tradition. The Mayflower Compact was only the beginning of a groundbreaking seventy-two-year experiment in civil government and the search for individual spiritual liberties. It is an experiment that can shine a light for us today.

Rev. Dr. Helen Hall (Associate Professor, Nottingham Trent University, Law School; qualified solicitor and Anglican priest), Dr. Javier Garcia Oliva (Head of the Law School, University of Manchester, constitutional lawyer) and Richard Pickering (the Museum's Deputy Executive Director & Senior Historian) will serve as panelists for three presentations called The Mayflower Compact: Four Hundred Years of Constitutional Experimentation. Their presentations will examine the legacy of Magna Carta and its influence on the Mayflower Compact and Plymouth Colony law as well as the place of both documents in British and American constitutional practice. In addition to their teaching, Rev. Dr. Hall and Dr. Javier Garcia Oliva are currently collaborating on the Balancing Beliefs project stemming from their monograph Religion, Law and the Constitution: Balancing Beliefs in Britain (Routledge 2018).

Options for online and in-person available.

This program is funded in part by a grant from the Plymouth Local Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.