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  • Published: 15 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781845951184
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

Making Haste From Babylon

The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History




A vivid and strikingly original account of the Mayflower project as well as the Pilgrims' first decade in the New Plymouth colony.

At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the Northern Hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Great Lakes, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation.

Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the atmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men and women readied themselves for war, pestilence or divine retribution. Against this background, and amid deep economic depression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile.

Within a decade, despite crisis and catastrophe, they built a thriving settlement at New Plymouth, based on beaver fur, corn and cattle. In doing so, they laid the foundations for Massachusetts, New England and a new nation.

Using a wealth of new evidence - from landscape, archaeology and hundreds of overlooked or neglected documents - Nick Bunker gives a vivid and strikingly original account of the Mayflower project and the first decade of the Plymouth Colony. Making Haste from Babylon tells the story of the early pilgrim settlers in unrivalled depth, from their roots in religious conflict and village strife at home to their final creation of a permanent foothold in America.

  • Published: 15 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781845951184
  • Imprint: Pimlico
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Nick Bunker

Nick Bunker is the author of An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, Young Benjamin Franklin: the Birth of Ingenuity and Making Haste from Babylon: the Mayflower Pilgrims and their World. In 2015 An Empire on the Edge won the George Washington Prize in the United States and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. In 2010 Making Haste from Babylon was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. A graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, and Columbia University, Bunker lives in Lincolnshire with his wife Susan and their otterhound, Champion Teckelgarth Mercury.

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Praise for Making Haste From Babylon

Making Haste from Babylon is essential reading for those who think they know the story of the Pilgrims. It will be pure pleasure for those who are new to the subject

Simon Middleton, BBC History Magazine

Even beyond its indefatigable scholarship and fine style, this book's sensitivity to the meaning of landscape should influence travel writers and historians for years to come

James McConnachie, The Sunday Times

His spirit, zeal and flair put most historians of his subject to shame

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Times

[Nick Bunker's] vivid style and bold analysis infuse this book with colour and pace, and the result is an indispensible contribution to understanding how it all began

Raymond Seitz, Literary Review

This new history has made those supposedly dull Puritans crackle with narrative energy and fizz with vibrant colour as never before

Christopher Silvester, Daily Express

An honest, intensive attempt to reconstruct the nemal world of the first Pilgrims, and the topography of the new lands in which they settled

Times Literary Supplement

The mythologised vision of the Pilgrim Fathers we have today - their black hats, their lace collars, the landing on Plymouth Rock - is largely a sentimental Victorian fabrication, says this rewriting of one of America's most sacred fables

Financial Times, Christmas round up

Timely... Nick Bunker has re-told an old story with aplomb, using a wealth of sources to capture the febrile mood of the time

Sally Cousins, Daily Telegraph

Admirable

New York Times