Fraser re-tells the story of the Pilgrims, giving special attention to the Winslow family, and expanding her view beyond the history of the Pilgrims and their colony. In addition to considerable detail about Winslow family connections in England, she includes much about the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s involvement with politcal upheavals in England, as well as anecdotal discussions aboiut many aspects of ordinary daily life. Unlike Nick Bunker’s Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History (New York, 2011), which overwhelms the Pilgrim story with interesting but extraneous contemporary topics, Fraser keeps either the Pilgrims generally or the Winslows and their political or family connections as her focus.
Beginning with Edward Winslow’s upbringing in a Worcestershire family on the edge of the gentry—farmers investing in a variety of commercial enterprises—she rapidly surveys his participation in Pilgrim activities in Leiden, where Winslow, who had left his unfinished...