
FAMILY LIFE IN THE ARCHIVES: THE STORIES OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION
The surviving information about Plymouth Plantation was not produced to help us understand family life: those records (whether publications describing early Plymouth like Good Newes from New England or court records or letters that are peppered through Bradford’s “Of Plimoth Plantation”) do not attend to the details of family life. But they can reveal some of those details inadvertently, and this talk will explore a few aspects of life in Plymouth that can be seen from the archive. Based on research for the recent book, The World of Plymouth Plantation, this talk will discuss family life in Plymouth as filtered through the archives.
Speaker: Dr. Carla Pestana is a distinguished professor of American history at UCLA. Her specialties include the 17th and 18th century Atlantic worlds, especially the English Atlantic; the Caribbean; and U.S. religious history. Her publications include Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts, which considered illegal religious communities in New England’s less tolerant colony, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (2004), a study of the effects of revolutionary upheaval in England, Ireland, and Scotland on England’s nascent empire, and The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (2017). Her latest book is The World of Plymouth Plantation (2020).
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