Fireside Chat, Interview
Ric Burns: Talks at GS Session Highlights
- Rick Burns, producer of the PBS series The Civil War and New York, introduces his new film The Pilgrims, which seeks to replace the "instant amnesia" surrounding the 1620 settlement with a nuanced historical record.
- The film challenges the national myth that the Pilgrims were the founders of American democracy, noting that Jamestown (1607) predates Plymouth (1620) and that the Pilgrims' actual legacy is one of survival rather than immediate nation-building.
- The 102 Pilgrims were not typical English settlers but "radical Protestant separatists" who believed the English Reformation had failed to purify the church sufficiently.
- Governor William Bradford, the film's central figure, was a deeply grieving orphan who lost his father, mother, two grandfathers, two sisters, and stepfather before age 12, driving him toward the radical Puritanism of William Brewster.
- Bradford served as governor for 31 of the colony's first 37 years and authored Of Plymouth Plantation, a 270-page handwritten manuscript created over two decades that is considered the first great work of American history and literature.
- The Mayflower journey and first winter were marked by catastrophic mortality: half the colony died within three months due to exposure, disease, and lack of shelter, as the settlers arrived during the "Little Ice Age" with no prepared housing.
- Plymouth was established on the site of Patuxet, where a 1614–1617 "virgin soil epidemic" had killed approximately 2,000 Wampanoag, leaving the area as a cleared boneyard with existing cornfields rather than active Native American territory.
- The subsequent alliance between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags was a desperate survival strategy between two depleted populations, not a harmonious celebration of freedom.
- The traditional Thanksgiving narrative is portrayed as a distorted memory; the actual event was likely a tense negotiation between starving colonists and weakened Native allies, not a "fun county fair."
- Plymouth Colony faced imminent bankruptcy by 1626, with a 1627 plan to merge with the corrupt all-male colony of Jamestown.
- The colony's economic survival and eventual fame were catalyzed by Edward Winslow discovering a beaver fur monopoly in the Kennebec River Valley, a commodity whose price quadrupled during the Thirty Years' War.
- The profitability of the fur trade in 1628–1629 attracted the 1630 Winthrop Fleet, which established Boston and led to the dissolution of the original Pilgrim communal experiment as members sought individual land ownership.
- Bradford wrote his history to ensure the colony's memory survived its physical decline, predicting that while the religious colony would vanish, its "history" would take root.
- The original manuscript was lost during the American Revolution after being taken by Loyalist Governor Thomas Hutchinson in 1767; it resurfaced in 1855 in the library of the Bishop of London.
- A 1856 printed copy of Bradford's journal published in Boston sparked a nationwide "Pilgrim craze," cementing the myth of the Pilgrims as America's primary origins.
- The original manuscript was repatriated to the Massachusetts State House 40 years later, fulfilling Bradford's hope that the colony's history would outlive its physical existence.
- By the end of the 19th century, the "story of the story" was complete, transforming a failed 17th-century religious experiment into the definitive myth of American national identity.