General Curiosity

E2 - The Mayflower Complex: Compacts, Corn Heists, and Contradictions

The Curious Alex Jones Episode 2

The Separatists who founded Plymouth Colony set out to build God’s perfect community—and immediately met with obstacles. After fleeing England, ditching the Dutch, and surviving a miserable Mayflower voyage, they landed way off course and wrote the surprisingly secular, and later influential, Mayflower Compact to keep the peace. What followed was an exhausting exploration, stolen corn, and divine excuses, as they laid the shaky, ironic groundwork for America’s “city upon a hill." 


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The 2 major sources used for this episode series are:

  • Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War by Nathaniel Philbrick, published in 2007 by Penguin Books
  • This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving by David J. Silverman, published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing