To Find Out More

There is a wealth of legends about Thomas Morton but little more factual material than appears in this story. However, for a general picture of Morion’s time and place, John Demos recommends Edmund S. Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Little, Brown and Company, 1962), “still one of the best accounts of those early settlements.” The same time and place, with more emphasis on the local Indians, is also explored in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by William Cronon (Hill & Wang, 1983). And for readers who want to see it all with their own eyes, a visit to The Plimoth Plantation itself, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is rewarding.