Skip to main content

Plymouth Company

The newly renovated replica of the historic ship was expected to make a celebratory journey home this summer, but COVID-19 had different plans.

The story of the Pilgrims’ journey 400 years ago, and the voyage of Mayflower II in 1957, are still sources of inspiration today.

Editor’s Note: We are delighted to publish another essay by Nathaniel Philbrick, author of such  outstanding books as In The Heart of the Sea and Sea of Glory.

“One nation is a copy of the other,” said John Adams on his first visit to the Netherlands; two centuries later an American visitor to Holland can still trace the connection

We are well weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange and hard land,” wrote John Robinson and William Brewster in 1617.

Strictly speaking, the high-spirited gathering was a harvest festival, not a thanksgiving.

  

The mysterious diseases that nearly wiped out the Indians of New England were the work of the Christian God — or so both Pilgrims and Indians believed.

In December of 1620, a group of English dissenters who “knew they were pilgrimes,” in the words of William Bradford, stepped ashore on the southern coast of Massachusetts at the site of the Wampanoag Indian village of Pawtuxet.

Did the Fathers in 1620 really land on that famous slab of granite? Through the haze of myth that surround it, a profound truth may be dimly seen

Above the rush of wind and water could be heard their hymns of praise as they sprang from the shallop onto the rock, the stern-faced men in wide-brimmed pot hats, the women modestly poised between this world and the next.

The Elizabethans and America: Part II -- The fate of the Virginia Colony rested on the endurance of adventurers, the financing of London merchants, and the favor of a courtier with his demanding spinster Queen.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate