RPTM Podcast Episode Eight: The Mayflower, Indentured Servitude, and Political Thought

When you get a chance, look at your old baby pictures. Or your kid’s baby pictures if you are a parent. Notice the faces of the past. They look so foreign sometimes. When looking at photos of my daughter Nora from several years back, I almost must do a double take to make sure I have the right baby. But as I look closer, I see her face in a forgotten face. Her eyes and chubby cheeks are there, just different. I can see where she is today, and what she was in the past, and I piece together all her subtle changes as she sadly matures into what will eventually be a surly teenager.

This is what this episode does for me as a historian. This is some of the first signs I see of America starting to move towards being America. Some good, some bad.

We keep this up and our country is going to be shaving soon.

HIGHLIGHTS

• In September 1620, a merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, a port on England's southern coast. Usually, the Mayflower's cargo was wine and dry goods. Still, on this trip, the ship carried passengers: 102 of them, all hoping to start a new life on the other side of the Atlantic. 
• Perhaps the most significant contribution of New Sweden to the New World's development is the traditional Finnish forest house building technique. The colonists of New Sweden brought the log cabin with them, which became such an icon of the American frontier that it is thought of as an American structure.
• The rise in the affordability of immigration reduced the emigrants' need for external financing in the form of indentures. the cost of immigration from Britain to the United States over the 18th century dropped from 50% of per capita income to less than 10%.
• During the colonial era, the experiences of women varied greatly from colony to colony and among different ethnic groups. 
• A lot of thought and beliefs systems that we hold today are birthed during this era of American history. Because of the massive immigration to New England in the 1630s, the articulation of Puritan ideals, and the early establishment of a college and a printing press in Cambridge, the British colonies have often been regarded as the center of early American literature. However, the first European settlements in North America had been founded elsewhere many years earlier.
• The American philosophical tradition began at the time of the European colonization of the New World. The Puritan's arrival in New England set the earliest American philosophy into religious practice. There was also an emphasis on the relationship between the individual and the community. 

​CHAPTERS
0:00 Start
0:38 Introduction
1:49 The Mayflower
9:04 New Sweden
15:25 Indentured Servitude
22:45 House Wives in the New World
26:56 17th Century Literature
33:00 17th Century Philosophy
46:11 Outro

RESOURCES
The Mayflower
New SwedenIndentured servitude in British America
The Origins of Servitude and Slavery in Colonial America
History of women in the United States
The Role of Women in the Colonies
American Literature
American literature
Fundamental Orders of Connecticut
Massachusetts Body of Liberties
John Winthrop
Roger Williams
Reformers – Roger Williams (1603 – 1683)

Episode 7

RPTM Podcast

Episode 9