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by William Bradford (Author)
Of Plymouth Plantation is William Bradford's indispensable firsthand history of the Pilgrims, the Mayflower voyage, and the founding of Plymouth Colony. Written by one of the colony's central leaders, the book follows the Separatist community from its religious struggles in England, its years in Holland, and its dangerous 1620 voyage across the Atlantic to the difficult first decades of settlement in New England. Bradford records hardship, hunger, disease, conflict, faith, governance, diplomacy, and survival with the seriousness of a man who understood that he was preserving the memory of an extraordinary beginning.
Begun in 1630 and covering events through 1647, with later material added in 1651, Bradford's account remains one of the most important primary sources for early American history. It preserves the world of the Mayflower passengers, the first winter, Plymouth's fragile survival, relations with Native peoples, the colony's internal tensions, and the religious convictions that shaped the community's identity. The manuscript itself also has a remarkable history: lost during the American Revolution, later found in the Bishop of London's library, and eventually returned to Massachusetts.
Readers interested in colonial America, the Pilgrims, the Mayflower, Puritan and Separatist religion, early New England, and American founding documents will find Of Plymouth Plantation essential. It is not a later myth of Plymouth, but the colony's own record from one of the people most responsible for its survival: a plain, powerful, and historically vital account of faith, exile, settlement, loss, and endurance.
