Lorelie L. (artgal36) reviewed The Times of Their Lives : Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony on + 471 more book reviews
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Rejecting both the sacred myth of the Pilgrim fathers and the revisionist view of the rigidly repressed Puritans, the Deetzes present a radically different picture of the settlers who populated Plymouth Colony. To humanize their subjects within their historical context, the^B authors scrutinized a variety of primary sources, including court records, probate inventories, wills, archaeological artifacts, and first-person chronicles of life in the early settlement. Although vivid descriptions of folk customs, houses, and furnishings are provided, the detailed accounts of superstitions, sexual indiscretions, and criminal proceedings offer an especially fresh perspective on daily life in seventeenth-century America. Neither saints nor villains, the Plymouth colonists were very much a product of their unique social, political, and cultural environment.
