An account of the early years of Plymouth Colony, told in part in the words of the settlers, with appendices reproducing original documents and biographical sketches.

This book investigates life in Plymouth Colony in the 1680-1690 decade that witnessed the formation of the county system in Plymouth Colony in 1685.The decade represented the beginning of the demise of Plymouth Colony and the absorption of the Colony into the larger and more prominent Massachusetts Bay Colony. This study focuses on family life, the land, and the church in the original Plymouth County towns of Plymouth, Duxbury, Marshfield, Scituate, Bridgewater and Middleborough. The book is based on extensive use of land, court, and probate records

An ambitious new history of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, published for the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing In 1620, separatists from the Church of England set sail across the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. Understanding themselves as spiritual pilgrims, they left to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. There exists, however, an alternative, more dispiriting version of their story. In it, the Pilgrims are religious zealots who persecuted dissenters and decimated the Native peoples through warfare and by stealing their land. The Pilgrims’ definition of liberty was, in practice, very narrow. Drawing on original research using underutilized sources, John G. Turner moves beyond these familiar narratives in his sweeping and authoritative new history of Plymouth Colony. Instead of depicting the Pilgrims as otherworldly saints or extraordinary sinners, he tells how a variety of English settlers and Native peoples engaged in a contest for the meaning of American liberty.

This text examines the family in the context of the colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. Demos portrays the family as a structure of roles and relationships of man and wife, parent and child and master and servant.