The Story We Need to Know Session One: THE MAYFLOWER PAPERS Reading Group
Explore The Mayflower Papers in a six-session course uncovering Plymouth Colony and Wampanoag history through eyewitness voices.
After the international success of the best-selling Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (2006), author Nathaniel Philbrick and his father Thomas Philbrick (Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh) collaborated on The Mayflower Papers, an engaging, entertaining, and compact anthology of selected writings from Colonial New England. Drawing on chronicles by Governors William Bradford and Edward Winslow, scapegrace Thomas Morton, captive Mary Rowlandson, and Captain Benjamin Church, The Mayflower Papers tell the story of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag Homeland from the Pilgrims' life in Leiden, Holland through King Philip's War in the 1670s.The anthology is a collection of six compelling Colonial eyewitness accounts skilfully edited by the Philbricks for readability.
In his preface to Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick says that instead of buckled shoes and buckled hats, and the courtship of John and Priscilla Alden, there is an "altogether new, rich, troubling, and complex ... story that we need to know." Led by Senior Historian Richard Pickering, The Mayflower Papers Reading Group is a six-session digital course with welcoming remarks by Nathaniel Philbrick. Throughout the series there will be guest specialists and culture keepers focusing on historical, spiritual, biographical, archaeological or lifeways elements of the eyewitness accounts. Some sessions will feature objects from the Museum's collections and archives. Every element of The Story We Need to Know will contribute to understanding what happened along these shores of change for good or for ill after the promise of the First Thanksgiving.