Hello and welcome to a history of the United States. Episode 31, The Massachusetts Bay Colony.

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Having spent the last 13 episodes dealing with the Pilgrims, from their roots in the European Reformation to Plymouth Colony in 1628,

from the starving few freezing to death in the wilderness, to a healthy colony,

about 300 strong. I want to pause the narrative and turn towards the colony which would

eventually absorb Plymouth, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This will involve taking us a bit into the future,

but its future will be very closely tied with Plymouth, since they are both rather important

in the foundation of the state of Massachusetts, which, when it comes down to it, is the series we're currently working on.

I've mentioned before that the grand scheme of this podcast, for the opening anyway, is to go

through the English colonies and bring them up to the 1670s, then we can cover Native American

history and global politics before advancing into the later colonial era.

So, in this manner, we sort of need to take Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay together.

This is why I'm including it here in the narrative, while when we were focusing on Virginia,

we skipped over the founding of Maryland.

Though this may yet change, since a lot of the New England colonies have such interconnecting histories.

Plymouth was the first and most successful of the early New England plantations. While it found success, it wasn't the

type of immediate riches those back in London were looking for. They didn't trust the pilgrims and

there had been too many issues with it. Other colonies began to spring up. We've already looked at Weston's attempt to found Wessigusset,

which was a disaster, and then the whole fiasco at Mount Mary, with selling firearms to the natives.

But on the fringes of the narrative, I hope I've been able to put across the point that things were beginning to get more organised.

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