The Mayflower Papers

Edited and introduced by Nathaniel Philbrick and Thomas Philbrick, this collection presents the principal seventeenth-century texts behind Mayflower. It includes selections from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation; Bradford and Edward Winslow’s Mourt’s Relation; Winslow’s Good News from New England; Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan; Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative; and Benjamin Church’s account of King Philip’s War.

Read together, the documents reveal competing colonial voices rather than a single founding story. Bradford describes migration, covenant and government; Winslow records diplomacy and survival; Morton mocks Puritan authority; Rowlandson interprets captivity through faith; and Church narrates frontier warfare from a participant’s perspective. The editors supply introductions and notes that connect the Mayflower settlement, relations with Indigenous nations and the violence of 1675–1678 while preserving the distinct assumptions and prejudices of the original writers.