** spoiler alert ** We Americans all have some vision of the Pilgrims, from Plymouth Rock to the first Thanksgiving, to what the colonial world looked like. The elementary school version--which has remarkable staying power for many--is the image of religious Pilgrims seeking religious freedom in a new world, nurtured by the help of the natives, giving us our idyllic First Thanksgiving. The revised standard version from the '60s focuses on the decimation of the native populations, the rapacious capitalists among the first settlers, and perhaps the Pilgrims actual record of religious intolerance.

Into these competing versions comes Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (2006). He traces events from the development of Puritan communities in England, their migration first to the Netherlands, and finally their hope of establishing an ideal religious community in America.

The Pilgrims had come to America not to conquer a continent, but to re-create their modest communities in Scrooby and Leiden. When they arrived at Plymouth in December 1620 and found it emptied of people, it seemed as if God had given them exactly what they were looking for. But as they quickly discovered during that first terrifying fall and winter, New England was far from uninhabited. There were still plenty of Native people, and to ignore or anger them was to risk annihilation. The Pilgrims' religious beliefs played a dominant role in the decades ahead, but it was their deepening relationship with the Indians that turned them into Americans.

By forcing the English to improvise, the Indians prevented Plymouth Colony from ossifying into a monolithic cult of religious extremism. For their part, the Indians were profoundly influenced by the English and quickly created a new and dynamic culture full of Native and Western influences. For a nation that has come to recognize that one of its greatest strengths is its diversity, the first fifty years of Plymouth Colony stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning.

By the midpoint of the seventeenth century, however, the attitudes of many of the Indians and English had begun to change. With only a fraction of their original homeland remaining, more and more young Pokanokets claimed it was time to rid themselves of the English. The Pilgrims' children, on the other hand, coveted what territory the Pokanokets still possessed and were already anticipating the day when the Indians had, through the continued effects of disease and poverty, ceased to exist. Both sides had begun to envision a future that did not include the other.

This leads to a major section of the book, on King Philip's War. Philbrick paints a fascinating picture of some of the personalities and cultural forces that defined the war, tensions not only between English settlers and natives, but within each group as well.

The nuanced vision offered of early New England was very interesting, particularly the earliest discovery and the war, was fascinating. Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the whole thing was the epilogue, from which the quotation above was taken, in which Philbrick not only brought together for summary and analysis everything that had come before, but also looked at the process of mythologizing that occurred in the intervening centuries, with each generation reinterpreting the stories for its own time. There was even, obliquely, an interesting implied (or at least, lightly stated) analogy to our current "war on terror."

Although I've only lived here a year and a half, it was also interesting to get a glimpse at the history of this area that is currently my home. Even for those of you living outside of New England, though, I recommend this book highly.