The Mayflower and ‘Mother Plymouth’: Anglo-America, Civic Culture and the Urban Past

Abstract

Historians are now well-attuned to the development of modern urban rituals and civic identities, and how both can depend on expressions of local and national historical character. In this article I take a different approach, by demonstrating how the idea of an Anglo-American shared past could also inflect urban culture. I use a case study of the Mayflower in Plymouth, tracing this seventeenthcentury voyage's afterlife, from its romantic and nonconformist Victorian origins to its emergence as a symbol of transatlantic 'Anglo-Saxon' bonds in the opening decades of the twentieth century, and all the way to its use as 'heritage' in the city today.

‘Why should not Citadels become Academies?’ Transatlantic Tercentenaries, Higher Education and Local Pasts in Britain after the First World War

“…26 Even as Rendel acknowledged that a number of towns in Britain, and indeed the Netherlands, had special claims to the Mayflower story, none could match 'Old Plymouth', the port from which the pilgrims made their final departure. 27 Thus, his most ambitious plan, a plan for a new 'Mayflower University', was reserved for Plymouth itself. Rendel first made this public suggestion in London, but word quickly spread through the newspapers of the southwest of England.…”