Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 80. I am your host, Jack Heneman.

And I'm recording this on July 11, 2022 in Austin, Texas. If you are new to the podcast,

we are telling the history of the lands now

encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. With a title like

the Mayflower Moment in History, there will be at least a few of you who have not necessarily

listened to all of the previous 79

substantive episodes of the History of the Americans podcast. No worries, you can still enjoy this one.

However, you might enjoy it even more if you have listened to the three Road to Plymouth episodes,

and especially the first one. The Road to Plymouth Part 1,

The First Pilgrims, opens with my take on why more Americans look to Plymouth as their origin

story than Jamestown, which shapes how I think of it. It might be a useful refresher, even for those

of you who heard it a few weeks back. As you know, I follow my muse, and this week my muse dictates that I start at the end of the story,

how Americans have looked upon the Mayflower moment, and particularly the famous Mayflower

compact over time.

Then, with all of that in mind, we will follow the pilgrims in our

traditional detail, focusing on moments that were new to me and I hope new to many of you.

The story of the Mayflower and the Pilgrims at Plymouth is easily the most well-known moment in 17th century colonial America,

at least to Americans who picked up their history haphazardly. After all, we are annually refreshed

in it at some level on Thanksgiving, which I think of as the American Passover. Surely one of

its purposes is to renew one of our national origin stories.

A group of families of English religious refugees, separatists from the Church of England

who had fled to Leiden in Holland, and soon thought of themselves as pilgrims, sailed with an equal number of strangers from

...