The Times of Their Lives : Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony

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Summary: Essential Deetz
Review: An absolutely wonderful, detail-filled account of early colonial America by one of the greatest archaeologists of our time. He will be missed.

Rating:
Summary: Shatter the Stereotype
Review: In this interesting book, Deetz and Deetz develop a realistic picture of the original settlers of Plymouth Plantation. Basically, these settlers were not our Thanksgiving stereotype of devout religious dissenters, grim and disciplined, who wore shoes with big square buckles. Instead, these settlers were much more diverse, and were a mixture of religious separatists (the minority) and secular types in search of land and prosperity. Of particular interest to me was the authors' discussion of crime in Plymouth. One warning: The book has passages that suffer from political correctness. This reader found them distracting.

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Summary: The Pilgrims through History, Myth and Archeology
Review: James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz's The Times of Their Lives (Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony) looks at the somewhat misnamed Pilgrims, including much recent archeological scholarship along with the usual documentary evidence upon which most historians exclusively rely. They show a great respect for the nineteenth century created myths surrounding the pilgrims while at the same time deconstructing them to present as realistic picture of this time as current research will allow. Along the way, they touch upon crime, sex, marriage, material culture, and food to give a full picture of the lives lived in Plymouth Colony, both British and Indian. The authors manage to make all of the archeological information quite palatable to the average reader. A nice read.

Rating:
Summary: really good
Review: You get the feeling Deetz is a bit of an ass, true, but the book speaks for itself; it's sensational. He gets right to the heart of the matter in the first pages: the truth about Thanksgiving is nothing like the perception. He brings the truth out of a morass of lies. Even in this time of greater accuracy in history-telling, Deetz's book stands out as a particularly honest approach. Yes, English people were responsible for the annihilation of the native population; that much even Jerry Falwell would acknowledge. But the fact that we cover it up and celebrate it with Thanksgiving is the sad part.
There was a lot more happening in the 1620s than historians have allowed us to see.

Rating:
Summary: really good
Review: You get the feeling Deetz is a bit of an ass, true, but the book speaks for itself; it's sensational. He gets right to the heart of the matter in the first pages: the truth about Thanksgiving is nothing like the perception. He brings the truth out of a morass of lies. Even in this time of greater accuracy in history-telling, Deetz's book stands out as a particularly honest approach. Yes, English people were responsible for the annihilation of the native population; that much even Jerry Falwell would acknowledge. But the fact that we cover it up and celebrate it with Thanksgiving is the sad part.
There was a lot more happening in the 1620s than historians have allowed us to see.

Rating:
Summary: Not a Martin's Hundred quality book
Review: _The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (W. H. Freeman) by James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, takes the history we would like to believe about the Pilgrims and makes it the history that is history, not wishful thinking. Prepare to abandon cherished ideas: Pilgrims almost undoubtedly never set that first foot on Plymouth Rock. Pilgrims dressed in brightly colored clothes. They didn't live in log cabins. They didn't eat turkey for Thanksgiving. They shot guns off to celebrate that first harvest, but no one is on record of thanking anyone for anything on that day. The most frequent crimes for which they were tried were sexual ones, and premarital sex occurred at a shocking rate. The mythmakers of the nineteenth century found the supposedly pure Pilgrims more attractive than the rowdy, fortune-seeking crew at Jamestown, even though Jamestown preceded Plymouth.

The Times of Their Lives deals with the social history of the colony, but also examines how the historians and archeologists have been able to come to present conclusions, some greatly at odds with Pilgrim image. The book climaxes with a description of the changes at Plimoth Plantation, the recreation of the colony along the lines of something like Williamsburg. James Deetz was a director of the museum for eleven years, and took the radical position that visitors should be induced to believe that they had really entered the seventeenth century because nothing would be present that was not there at that time. This lively and fascinating book explains some of how the authenticity was confirmed and instilled in the museum. If we have to abandon some idealization of purity in our puritans, so much the better for a humane understanding of their history.