This episode starts at the end of the story of the Pilgrims at Plymouth by looking at the famous “Mayflower Compact,” and how Americans have spoken and written about it for more than 200 years. Was it a “document that ranks with the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution as a seminal American text,” or merely an expediency for heading off the possibility of mutiny? Everybody from John Adams to historians writing today – and now the History of the Americans Podcast! – have debated that first grassroots American social contract.

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Selected references for this episode

(If you buy any of these books, please click through the links on the episode notes on the website.)

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War

George Bancroft, A History of the United States From the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present Time (Vol 1)

Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: The New World

Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People

Paul Johnson, History of the American People

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America

Walter A. McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828

Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

Louis P. Masur, The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America

Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

The American Yawp (Vol 1)

Mark L. Sargent, “The Conservative Covenant: The Rise of the Mayflower Compact in American Myth,” The New England Quarterly, June 1988.