The Pilgrims had come to America not to conquer a continent but to re-create their modest communities in Scrooby and in Leiden. When they arrived at Plymouth in December 1620 and found it emptied of p...
THE PILGRIMS HAD BEEN DRIVEN by fiercely held spiritual beliefs. They had sailed across a vast and dangerous ocean to a wilderness where, against impossible odds, they had made a home. The purity of t...
THAT SPRING WASHINGTON received a letter from Lafayette, who had long since returned to France. Now that peace was looking like a certainty, he had a wild scheme to propose: the two of them should buy...
Some Englishmen privately admitted that if the Narragansetts had chosen to join Philip in July, all would have been lost. As the Nipmucks assailed them from the west, the far more powerful Narraganset...
Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows;
Nickerson began to understand, as only an adolescent on the verge of adulthood can understand, that the carefree days of childhood were gone forever: Then it was that I, for the first time, realized t...
It has been estimated that at least a thousand Indians were sold into slavery during King Philip’s War, with over half the slaves coming from Plymouth Colony alone. By the end of the war, Mount Hope,...
In the end, both sides wanted what the Pilgrims had been looking for in 1620: a place unfettered by obligations to others.
As Arnold had demonstrated, the real enemy was not Great Britain, but those Americans who sought to undercut their fellow citizens’ commitment to one another. Whether it was Joseph Reed’s willingness...
Part of what makes a revolution such a fascinating subject to study is the arrival of the moment when neutrality is no longer an option. Like it or not, a person has to choose.
It may have been true that from a strictly legal standpoint there was nothing wrong with how Winslow and the other Plymouth officials acquired large amounts of Pokanoket land. And yet, from a practica...
As Starbuck discovers, simply being a good guy with a positive worldview is not enough to stop a force of nature like Ahab, who feeds on the fears and hatreds in us all.
It was not as if the rest of the nation was suffering from want. .. Americans were experiencing a war-related economic boom. these same citizens might be enjoying an unusual level of prosperity, but t...
POLLARD had known better, but instead of pulling rank and insisting that his officers carry out his proposal to sail for the Society Islands, he embraced a more democratic style of command. Modern sur...
No longer mindful of the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have endured their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims’ children were less willing to treat Nativ...
It is painful to witness the death of the smallest of God’s created beings, much more, one in which life is so vigorously maintained as the Whale! And when I saw this, the largest and most terrible of...