Hello and welcome to a history of the United States.

Episode 21, wibbly wobbly, timey-wimmy stuff.

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On Christmas Day, 1620, the construction of the first common house of Plymouth began. So beginning New England. But today, before we continue the narrative in the Plymouth Colony, I want to go back to England. The focus of the last few episodes has been on the pilgrims themselves, their

adventures. We've only spent a bit of time talking about Western and the London merchants who

funded the expedition. This is a very simple version of the story, and now that we have the

pilgrims in what would become the United States, it's time to take a version of the story, and now that we have the pilgrims in what would become the

United States, it's time to take a bit of a more detailed view of what happened.

New England has one of the more complicated histories out there, as things go.

Virginia was nice and easy.

The Virginia company was set up, it founded a colony

called Virginia, and the colony of Virginia later became a state, also called Virginia. Nice, simple.

Now, things are a bit different with New England. The first thing you'll notice is that there is no state called

New England, and there is no state called Plymouth. Why? Right now in the narrative, in 1620,

we have Plymouth Colony, which existed in a state of semi-independence. The pilgrims, you'll recall, were supposed to settle in

Virginia. They did not have a charter to settle where they did, and Plymouth Colony would be on shaky

legal footing until its absorption into the province of Massachusetts Bay, along with the

Massachusetts Bay Colony and the province of Maine in 1692.

The Canadian colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were also briefly part of the province

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