SOURCE: “Silent Partners: Historical Representation in William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation” in Early American Literature, Vol. 33, No. 3, 1998, pp 291-314.

In the following essay, Read proposes that Bradford's history is best understood as an early development in economic historiography. Read focuses on differences between the first and second books, noting an emphasis on providential and genealogical history in the first and an emphasis on economics in the second.

William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation remains both one of the most and one of the least readable texts from early colonial New England. Bradford receives praise for his unusually personal and varied style, his humor, his talent for balancing piety and pragmatism; for these reasons, as well as for the contributions of Bradford's book to a particular form of American mythology, Of Plymouth Plantation is more often studied and taught than the works of Bradford's near-contemporaries in the Massachusetts Bay Colony...