If I had to guess, I’d say it became the biggest chapter in history books about the time Thankgiving was turning into a holiday.
Prior to that, it wasn’t the first colony - there was Jamestown, and since Florida became part of the US, Florida colonies should be mentioned (Ponce de León took a stab at one a hundred years before the Mayflower)
And it wasn’t the first to become tenable or rich.
Other colonies like Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania get only a fraction of the ink.
If I were a teacher in Ben Franklin’s time or Abe Lincoln’s, would I have made such a fuss over Plymouth? Would it even have appeared in my history reader?
Considering how important Boston was in the early 19th century it’s not surprising. Consider also how families which stay in one place almost always are more aware of their ancestors who lived in the same area, than families which migrate. In Boston you had families who had already been living there for 200 years and I’m sure there was a lot of family history that had been passed down through the generations. There was probably a clearer history of what happened at Plymouth Rock, than any other point of initial colonization.
Families that moved further West every generation, on the other hand, tended to let the old family stories go as they got on with de-stumping fields and building sod houses and what not. My patrilineal line of descent is an example of that; we didn’t even know anyone earlier than my great-grandfather, until a distant cousin published a genealogy.
I can’t help but wonder if there are descendants from the lost colony of Roanoke, VA living somewhere, only nobody knows about it because it’s been forgotten?
Well, if there was a “lost colony of Roanoke, VA”, it’s truly been forgotten. However, information about the Lost Colony of North Carolina’s Roanoke Island is quite plentiful.
The impact of the Mayflower travelers on the New World was significant, as was their interaction with the natives. The settlement of (then) remote outposts, and the defense of them established new borders for the colonists, and alliances with (and dependencies on) native tribes. Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick is an excellent book about not only how they got there, but how they survived.
Your nit is improperly picked. The settlement of Roanoke was part of “Virginia” at the time, the Carolina grant having not yet been given (the split into North and South Carolina came even later than that).
I asked the exact same question here a while ago and now I can’t find it. My last name is a straight lineage from the 1st Colony at Jamestown and I was ticked off when I found out that the first Thanksgiving happened there and was completely forgotten.
I can’t remember the whole answer to my thread but, like everything else, it boils down simply into politics and media making the Plymouth Colony the poster child for New World settlement even though it wasn’t the first. One person had a good point that the prior colonies were not set up as clean breaks from Europe. They were for profit no matter how that worked out in the end. The Plymouth Colony declared clear intentions that they were never going back so their colony was viewed as special.
Like Walloon said, while people in Virginia and the Carolinas were raising crops and people in Pennsylvania and New York were building factories, people in New England were writing books.
It really does seem odd to me, when I was in AP US History my Junior Year of high school the Virginia colony (mainly jamestown) seemed infinitely more interesting than Plymouth (at least early on, they eavened out eventually), granted this was also teh first time I heard about this stuff in detail so maybe I’d already had been bored of Plymouth and didn’t know it making virginia interesting in comparison.
I vagely recall very fun things, like the fact that pretty much everyone there was a male and they practically rounded up prostitutes in britain, shiped them to America and married them right off the boat. Come to think of it… Plymouth is vaguely more innocent, not to mention I don’t think 5th graders (I think ti seems more studied since it’s rehashed every year since 3rd grade, I could be wrong and it could really be THAT much more studied though) can grasp the concepts of new land apportionment, indentured servitude, 7 pounds being an outlandish sum of money, and the other things that came with the first relatively succesful British colony.
Plymouth also seems to be more romantic (in theory), I mean the puritans were great people who didn’t want to be opressed and follow their dreams! Virginia was… a bunch of grubby money makers. Granted noone ever mentions how the US was founded off of a nation of smugglers who complained about taxes they should have had in the first place (I may be wrong but wasn’t the rest of Britain and thier colonies paying these taxes already when tehy hit us with them?) but weren’t being enforced because of salutary neglect, because you know… we’re perfect!
Judging by this I think it comes down to “Plymouth sounds better to developing minds.”
Another factor to consider - IIRC most of Jamestown’s original inhabitants were indentured servants, expecting to do their time, then go back to England. I also think that the first residents there were either exclusively male, or nearly so. Which is a bit hard for me to consider a true colony. Plymouth was a deliberate attempt to settle and stay in the New World, made up of family units.
Also the Mayflower Compact is one of those high-minded documents that people can get really excited about as being a demonstration of American ideals.
Nitpick - Boston was founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which consisted of Puritans who landed in 1630, and was separate and distinct from the Plymouth Colony, which consisted of Pilgrims who landed in 1620. They didn’t combine until 1691.
I think a lot of the ascendancy of Plymouth over Jamestown is marketing. Jamestown was the first successful colony, but they were just a crew of money grubbing capitalists, whereas Plymouth consisted of religious nutjobs. Nutjobs always get better press.
, but I don’t recall by whom. Richard Shenckman, i thing, in his book Legens, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History The book is like a historical analog to Walker’s Flying Circus og Physics – more useful as a listing of interesting but often useful facts with copious references, but not much information itself. only I don’t recall whic references he uses for this statement, if any. It does seem to correlate with my reading, though. The history of Jamestown and of other Southern colonies is shamefully neglected . And one thing that’s always bugged me is how cavalierly the history of Florida is treated – it had a history of being bandied back and forth by England and Spain, but all we were told in school was a laconic notation that it was “ceded by Spain”, with nary a detail.
Oddly enough, the big play the Plymouth Colony gets is about it being established to provide religious freedom. The religous freedome it provided was the freedom for the Puritans to prohibit the practice of any other religion than their own brand of Christianity. Far from being religous reformers and enlightened, the Puritans were a reactionary and oppressive force. That gets conveniently left out of most texts.
Agreed. And not only that, they certainly had religious freedom in the Netherlands, where they were staying before they went to America. But they were afraid of liosing their religiousd identity among the free interplay of influences. They went to America to get away from religious freedom. in other words.
Then they not only outlawed other religions in their colony, they went as far as to go to the nearby settlent of Thomas Morton’s Merrrmount, chop down his scandalous pagan Maypole, and bring charges against him.
Are you sure? Cuz in the book I mentioned (Mayflower), there is a reference to a young man who had sex with several farm animals, including chickens. He was arrested, forced to watch all of the animals hanged, then hanged himself. Sounds more like Shagnasty to me.
One thing I recall is that my college text on American Thought and Language spent all its time on New England writers like Cotton Mather. All full of religion and pontificating about how to live, which of course was more popular in Massachusetts than in the wide open trading centers down the coast.
