The first is that Bunker, a former banker and financial journalist, rests his case on the most fundamental element of historical craft: excavating significant caches of previously unknown or overlooked documents that amplify the traditional 17th century primary sources (notably William Bradford's famous Of Plymouth Plantation). Nick Bunker's Making Haste from Babylon is a major new work that both rides this wave and raises it considerably higher. They figure peripherally in entertaining recent books by Tony Horwitz and the always lively Sarah Vowell, whose The Wordy Shipmates (2008) is as notable for its analytic sophistication as its wit. Meanwhile, in popular history, Nathaniel Philbrick hitched the narrative of the Pilgrims' progress to a wider arc that culminated in King Philip's War a half century later in Mayflower (2006). The following year, James and Patricia Deetz took a more anthropological approach in The Times of Their Lives. In 1999, John Seelye looked at their role in collective memory in The Place of Plymouth Rock.

There has been a range of important work in the last decade, however, that suggests the protean ability of the Pilgrims to advance varied historiographic agendas. Even among those who have embarked on such studies, there has been a long-term effort to argue that they either typified the larger pattern of imperial conquest or, alternatively, that their atypical qualities (demographic, ideological, or the like) make them a misleading template compared with colonial projects on mid- or southern Atlantic seaboard or elsewhere. For starters, the multicultural turn in academe has made the study of relatively privileged white people problematic. But their status in the academy, after peaking mid-century in the work of historians like Perry Miller and Edmund Morgan, has been a good deal more wobbly.

The Pilgrims are firmly ensconced - well, maybe not firmly ensconced, but ensconced nonetheless - in the collective American imagination.

The following review was posted last night on the Books page of the History News Network. Nick Bunker paints a vivid - and notably broad - portrait of the Pilgrims in Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World

Making haste from babylon review