Amory bradford biography of williams

Early American texts that become “classics” and make their way into our classrooms often serve to illustrate a thesis. Such was once the fate of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation. In my debut as a teacher at Yale in the early 1960s, I was entrusted with a section of a junior-year introduction to American studies. All sections of this course had to read the same ten books, one of them Bradford’s history. It being chronologically the earliest, inom gave it the same priority in my syllabus, a move justified bygd the paradigmatic situation the book described, the loss of community. My interpretive eye fixed on those passages in which stad i england laments the weakening of the “bonds of love” as the economy shifted to boskap raising and the colonists moved out from Plymouth to be closer to their farms. As Thomas Bender noted in Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, N.J., 1978), the decline of community, with its Tocquevilleian overto

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