Nobody knows more about the Plymouth colony and the Separatist community in Leiden that launched it than Jeremy Bangs. Over the past forty years, this remarkably dedicated historian has published fifteen books and close to fifty articles and book chapters on the topic. This volume collects a number of those published essays along with a few others not previously published and some unpublished lectures to convey the key insights from this life of research. The book's fifteen chapters are divided into three parts. The first treats the seventeenth-century history of this colony. The second examines the broader seventeenth-century Dutch context of toleration of which the Pilgrims were one small part. The third, and most original and enlightening, discusses the many ways the Pilgrims have been commemorated in the centuries since their colony was absorbed into Massachusetts in 1691. This organization reflects Bangs's distinctive background, which combines editorial work with various primary sources—especially town records—an expertise in Dutch history, and extensive experience in museum work.

It is an idiosyncratic but informative book. Bangs is not an academic historian with a university post. He is more of a modern antiquarian, in the best sense of the word, deeply immersed in all available primary sources and all of the secondary accounts that have been written about Plymouth colony since the seventeenth century (his historiographic essay, “Always More Pilgrim Books,” though terse, provides a valuably comprehensive overview of the many books written about the colony since the seventeenth century). He brings a healthy skepticism to the work of historians who swoop in and enlist its history in the service of some bigger agenda, usually an origin story: of American democracy, American business acumen, American family life, American evangelicalism, or multicultural America. He is likewise skeptical of those who claim there is nothing new to be said about Plymouth colony. A remark made to that effect forty years ago when he worked in the Leiden Municipal Archives sparked his years of research on the Pilgrims, which has added significantly to our knowledge of their life in Holland and America by publishing local town records. Those of Scituate, the best documented, took up three published volumes.

The core value of this volume lies in Bangs's deeply informed criticisms of the writing and (mis)representation of Plymouth's history. His writing is not economical, nor did he revise and re-edit these essays before publication, so one has to wade through a good deal of occasionally repetitious prose to discern his point. Overall, in his hands the Pilgrims (a term they did employ) come off neither as unreasonable nor as intolerant as they have sometimes been portrayed. Likewise, efforts to attribute modern American democracy to this colony are rather far-fetched, although “democratic” is the way he describes their church order. They did distinguish themselves from other English colonies by practicing civil marriage, a custom picked up from the Dutch. The Mayflower Compact mattered to them as a constitutional precedent for their legal order, but they wanted it to be grounded in English law. They did not see themselves as setting an example for a new nation. His review of the many distortions about the first Thanksgiving currently circulating around the internet will be especially valuable to early American historians who get that seasonal call to describe the event and its significance. Here once again the discussion of the Pilgrims has moved far beyond the documentary evidence and immediate seventeenth-century context.

In addition to his deep familiarity with the primary documents, Bangs has experience with visual and material culture. He is currently director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum and once was chief curator of the Plimoth Plantation, but his interest in visual arts actually precedes his work on the Pilgrims. He began as a scholar of art in early modern Leiden. He brings this background to bear with effect in several essays. One discusses the imaginative efforts to recreate the architecture of early seventeenth-century Plymouth: something for which little direct evidence exists. Two others, one on three paintings and another on the history of commemoration, poke holes in American exceptionalism by showing the remarkable degree to which the visual representations of the Pilgrims resemble aspects of Dutch art and culture.

It is difficult to come up with an overall argument for such a sprawling assortment of essays as this. However, a few points stand out. First, Bangs insists that the Pilgrims’ religious ideals be taken seriously—and understood in their contemporary context. His documentation of the range of religious texts they brought over with them demonstrates just how closely engaged they were with the religious literature of their time. Second, they, or at least their elite, were cosmopolitan in outlook, drawing on their knowledge of Dutch history, law, and culture as well as their English heritage. The section discussing Dutch toleration and the assistance the Dutch Republic gave to the Swiss and German Mennonites in the late seventeenth century, before they migrated to Pennsylvania, might seem off topic here but it does suggest how Bangs sees Plymouth's story as part of a broader history of Protestant radicalism and toleration. Third, for many people the real significance of the colony lies more in its presumed influence on modern American culture than its actual seventeenth-century history. Finally, despite the long tradition of claiming that all that can be said about Plymouth colony has already been said, he demonstrates time and again that there is more to say.

This book is not a thorough account of the colony's full history; Bangs believes that work still needs to be written. It is, however, a thorough foundation for whoever decides to write that account.