Revolutionary Ideas Started Here: From 1620 Pilgrims to 1776 Patriots (Member Program)
Is Plymouth the first colony?
By no means, but chronological priority isn’t synonymous with cultural significance. (Just ask playwright Nicholas Udall. He wrote plays before Shakespeare. Poor guy.) Plymouth was more than a financial enterprise, and that is what secures its place in our imaginations. Mayflower passenger Edward Winslow said the Plymouth Colony would be a refuge where “religion and profit jump together.” It would be even more than that. Plymouth would also become a place of creative improvisation in self-government and constitutional institution building -- legacies that shaped the American Revolution.
Plymouth was a place Where Revolutionary Ideas Began. As Americans we can’t understand the last 250 years without also understanding what came before — the 150 years after Mayflower’s arrival. As David Brooks has suggested — an aspirational, unifying, and redemptive national narrative can find its fountainhead in the Mayflower Compact and the power that it gave the colonists to “enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices … as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony…” As Americans, all of us are Plymouth’s civic descendants. Being a nation founded on ideals gives American life both its intellectual luster and its constant spiritual and ethical challenges.
This lecture will be led by Richard Pickering, Plimoth Patuxet's Deputy Executive Director & Senior Historian.