SOURCE: “William Bradford's ‘Dialogue’ with History,” in New England Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3, 1992, pp. 389-421.

In the following essay, Sargent examines Bradford's fictional dialogues between young men of New England and older colonists from Europe, comparing them to Of Plymouth Plantation. Sargent concludes that the dialogues shed light on Bradford's struggles within the Separatist movement as well as his ambivalence about the colonial project in North America.

When the manuscript of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation was shipped to Boston in 1897, Massachusetts Senator George F. Hoar boasted that the commonwealth had recovered one of its “chiefest treasures.” The text was “priceless,” he proclaimed. There was “nothing like it in human annals since the story of Bethlehem,” for it was the “only authentic history of what we have a right to consider the most important political transaction that has ever taken place on the face of the earth.”¹ Presumably lost...