The Warren Cousins
The Warren Cousins
The Warren Cousins 2025 Annual Meeting -Sunday, September 28, 2025
Richard Pickering, Deputy Executive Director & Chief Historian, Plimoth Patuxet Museums, and a Warren Cousin, presented:
Plymouth Colony, the Warrens, and the Origins of Our Revolutionary Democracy
Is Plymouth the first colony? By no means, but chronological priority isn’t synonymous with cultural significance. (Just ask playwright Nicholas Udall. He wrote plays before Shakespeare. Poor guy.) Plymouth was more than a financial enterprise, and that is what secures its place in our imaginations as Virginia does not. Mayflower passenger Edward Winslow said the colony would be a refuge where “religion and profit jump together.” It would be even more than that. Plymouth would also become a place of creative improvisation in self-government and constitutional institution building. Plymouth was the place Where Revolutionary Ideas Began and the Warrens were there from the beginning. As Americans we can’t understand the last 250 years without also understanding what came before -- the 150 years after our ancestors' arrival aboard Mayflower.
An aspirational, unifying, and redemptive national narrative can find its fountainhead in the Mayflower Compact and the power that it gave the colonists to “enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices … as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony…” As Americans, all of us are Plymouth’s civic descendants. Some of us are lucky enough to be their actual descendants too. Being a nation founded on ideals gives American life both its intellectual luster and its constant spiritual and ethical challenges.
View the presentation here.
via Zoom
2025 Annual Meeting
