Book 17 - The Wordy Shipmates - Sarah Vowell

Well I'm winding down from Thanksgiving, and between tryptophan-induced comas I've managed to knock out a couple of books.  In somewhat keeping with the holiday, I decided to read something to do with the early Puritan settlers for whom the holiday is rightly or wrongly associated.

Book 17 - The Wordy Shipmates - Sarah Vowell

The Wordy Shipmates is a witty view of the early Puritan settler's foray into the new world, but it forgoes tales of  the Mayflower voyagers that landed at Plymouth Rock, and instead focuses mainly on those settlers that came across ten years later on the Arbella and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the site where the city of Boston stands today (more or less).  Vowell establishes early on that there is an extremely important difference between the two settlements.  While the Plymouth pilgrims were separatists, wanting nothing to do with the Church of England, those who founded Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to maintain their membership in the Church, thinking that they could reform it from within.  This creates an interesting theological and political tightrope they must walk in order to stay true to their principals and not piss off the King, who you may recall is - thanks to Henry VIII's marital problems - the head of the Church of England.

Managing this balancing act falls greatly on John Winthrop, the founding governor of the colony and the man who inspired the colonists as well as Ronald Reagan's speechwriters with his line: "For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."  Winthrop has the thankless task of keeping some of the more radical colonists in check, such as the separatist John Endecott, and the always "out there" Roger Williams, whose ideas eventually lead him to be banished.  Winthrop is forced to constantly spin the actions of these and others in order to keep the King at bay.
 
Vowell has a deep love/hate relationship with these Puritans, admiring many of their principles while abhorring many of their deeds.  She admires the free-thinking Roger Williams who puts forward such radical ideas as true freedom of religion (most in the colony felt you were free to worship as they did), separation of church and state, and the notion that the land actually belonged to the Indians.   She also seems to admire the prototypical feminism displayed by Anne Hutchinson, who has the gall to develop her own theological ideas and the unmitigated audacity to preach them to others, which winds up in her banishment.  She seems to admire many of the ideas Winthrop puts forth, but looks down on some of his actions, such as his role in the trial of Hutchinson.  She paints a particularly unflattering picture of The Mystic Massacre, in which John Mason and John Underhill burned the Pequot fort to the ground, resulting in the deaths of 700 men, women and children.

The book is technically a history book, I guess, but it is filled with wit and humor, and is constantly drawing parallels between the actions of the Puritans and more modern historical events and pop culture.  Vowell makes references to The Brady Bunch and a little known show named Thanks, a sitcom based on Puritan life that briefly aired on CBS in 1999.  At one point Vowell tells us that Winthrop is to Williams as Pete Seeger is to Bob Dylan, and compares William's zeal for the pursuit of his religious ideas without care for consequences to Oppenheimer's search for the atomic bomb.  All-in-all, it's an interesting view on what might be viewed as a rather dull subject.

As usual, I probably haven't done justice to the book, so to compensate I dug up some clips in which Vowell previewed some of this material on This American Life.  You can listen here:
Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTXUSQraEvE
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA59w8yPzJY