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Thomas Morton & The Maypole of Merrymount: Disorder in the American Wilderness 1624-1647 (1992) is a 2-hr. portrait of Thomas Morton, from his boyhood in Elizabethan England to his adventures in New England. Producer Jack Dempsey's first film, it includes full interviews with Slow Turtle, late Supreme Medicine Man of the Wampanoags; with Nanepashemet (above) on early New England cultures, and with Captain Myles Standish himself (played by Plimoth interpreter David Walbridge). With all the same lively features as NANI above, local and national historians weigh in on the significance of Morton's life and book New English Canaan ---from John Langstaff of Revels, Inc. to historians Richard Drinnon and Barbara Mor and a host of local experts. Though technically a journeyman's piece, Morton is packed with educational entertainment. Distributed by the producer. |
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New English Canaan by Thomas Morton of "Merrymount": Text and Notes, edited by Jack Dempsey (2000: 263 pp. incl. Index, 10 Illustrations: ISBN #1-582-18206-X: Scituate, MA: Digital Scanning Inc. 781-545-2100: or digitalscanning.com). Also available at Amazon.com. The first annotated edition in over 100 years of Morton's infamous 3-part portrait of Native and Colonial New England---from Book 1's detailed, tolerant, admiring study of "the Indians" to the region's landscapes and commodities, creatures, and (Book 3) colonists of many kinds. Full of natural history, witty observation, Pilgrim-pounding parodies and bursts of extraordinary poetry, Canaan is finding its deserved place at the foundations of American history and literature. REVIEW by Professor William Pencak Pennsylvania State University in ETHNOHISTORY 52:2 (Spring 2005), pp. 441-442
"Another multiracial community hidden from history that deserves more attention is the short-lived Merrymount made famous by Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story. Established in 1624 at Mount Wollaston (Braintree, the future birthplace of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams) and dismantled in 1630 by the Puritans, Thomas Morton described his colony as a "New England Canaan"---the title of a book he published in 1637, "Canaan"---the land flowing with milk and honey---was designed as a riposte to the Puritans' claim to be the "New Israel," for Morton maintained that the visible saints did nothing more than embody the worst features of the "Old Israel"---the Old Testament Jews. Morton stands what the Puritans and their defenders (who are still prominent among historians today) accept as gospel on its head. "The Puritans, he claims with considerable justice, were far more intolerant than was the "broad" Anglicanism he espoused. They, not the Indians, who traded (and whose women cavorted) freely with the young men who comprised most of Merrymount's population, were the real savages. Morton describes the Indians' peaceful and consensually organized society with respect, especially when he contrasts it with the Puritans': for instance, he compares Puritan burial practices, which lacked any sort of ritual, with the respect the Indians exhibited for the deceased. The Puritans were ant communal, disruptive of the English nation, and individually covetous despite their pretensions to be a holy society. In contrast to the bleak discipline of the Puritan church, Morton offers a vision of "harmless mirth" in "the revels of New Canaan," which he celebrates in poems claiming that a society based on the pleasures of Greek antiquity was far superior to one founded on Old Testament Judaism. Morton, in short, hoped to create a different sort of City on a Hill, an interracial utopia for which Sir John Falstaff might have been an appropriate patron saint. "Jack Dempsey, the editor of Morton's New English Canaan, is a vigorous champion of his author (he has also made a documentary film about Merrymount that I would very much like to see, if his editorial work is any indication.) He does a fine scholarly job, make no mistake, but he has nevertheless produced the sort of volume that makes one glad university presses and referees have not completely taken over publishing. His annotations and essays---extensive discussion of classical references, a loving account of "Merrie Olde England" the Puritans abhorred, an alternatively humorous and gripping account of Morton's life, and numerous illustrations---combine with Morton's book in a delightfully expansive format to convey the exuberance that Merrymount itself embodied. Morton's Captains Shrimp (Plimoth's Captain Myles Standish) and Little worth (Massachusetts' John Endicott), along with his riotous songs and scintillating prose, should make this text required reading for all early American literature and history courses." . |
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Thomas Morton: The Life and Renaissance of an Early American Poet (2000: 417 pp. incl. Index, 2 Bibliographies, 41 Illustrations: ISBN # 1-582-18209-4: Digital Scanning Inc.). The first full-length biography of Thomas Morton incl. 10 documented chapters on his early life, educations in nature, culture and law; his rich readings, his voyage to America, his methods and fortunes there, and the creation of Morton's Canaan in the midst of English Renaissance and Reformation politics. Two further sections include a broad study of America's first poets and poetry in English and a detailed solution of the "Riddle" fixed to Morton's 1627 Maypole---which won Honorable Mention for Best Essay in its field for 1999, noted in the professional journal Early American Literature (Vol. 34 #3, 1999). |
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So you think you know The Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation, what happened and why in their first 3 years of relations with Native New England? This book includes a new edition of Winslow's Good News (1624), the first printing since 1858 of Weymouth colonist Phinehas Pratt's account of "The Weymouth Massacre," and excerpts from influential related works in contest over these events by Wm. Bradford, Thomas Morton, H. W. Longfellow, C. F. Adams Jr., George Willison, Karen Ordahl Kupperman and others. While their accounts together illustrate the ongoing struggles of interpretation, a detailed 70-pp. Editor's Introduction brings all the evidences old and new together to promote new understandings of these foundations of New England and America. |
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A Startling Reversal from Massacre to Victory Traditions say that in May 1637, a force of English colonists and Native allies marched "undetected" across southern New England and surprised the Pequot village of Missituc/Mystic. They trapped and killed 300-700 Native men, women and children, and broke the back of Pequot dominion. But imagine histories of Gettysburg whose authors had never walked the battlefields. What does the land itself say to these untested records? The answer is here---a "journey to a most unlikely massacre" that wakes us to tragi-comic truth of national import, in a post-imperial globalizing world. MYSTIC FIASCO is the most comprehensive and detailed account of this warthat hard-wired the American psyche. In its story of failed conquest and survival, in its research and visual artistry, you'll journey to an astonishing Native victory built from know-how, daring cooperation and stifled laughter---in the face of colonists "altogether ignorant" of the land, tribal distinctions and New World combat. You'll read this landscape and American History itself in new ways---for here exposed are its great works that invented and hand down "Mystic Massacre," a frontier-paradigm that still bedevils American foreign policy. ---244 pages, 54 Illustrations, Annotated Chronology, Index--- Chapters Include: 1) With Friends and Plans Like These 2) Getting There Is Half (Somebody's) Fun The Assault on Missituc/Mystic: 3) "It Is Naught": Going In 4) "It Is Naught": Getting Out 5) Aftermath: "So Must We Be As One" 6) "O Brave Pequots!" 7) Mystical Massacre |
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or signed from the author contact jpd37@hotmail.com
in Greek Translation 1998 (ISBN#960-219-090-6) by Vicky Chatzopolou |
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REVIEW by Diane Darling, Editor GREEN MAN MAGAZINE #11, Winter 1996 "I savored this book for months. I kept it by my bed and rarely would I turn out the light without first entering into the lost world of great Crete. "The story is told entirely in the first person, by Deucalion, brother/consort of the last true Queen of Crete. His story spans the beginning of the end of his world, through the agony of the ending, and on to the beginnings of cultural domination of Greek ideas, under which we yet labor, thousands of years later. "John Dempsey has written this well-researched (and in its academic niche, well-respected) fictionalization of the beginningless time when men and women were partners in the world, when the gods were alive in every spring and mountain and the Queen's heart. Striking is the balance of gender values: men are ornamented, poets, defenders, traders and clergy; so are women, who are also legislators, mercenaries, craftswomen, priestesses. The betweenish---eunuchs and fey folk---are powerful due to their union of opposites, and valued for their courage. In time the reader loses track of who is what, and finds the distinction mostly irrelevant. "By contrast, the "hero" Theseus, who is effectively Ariadne's hostage, displays the usual signs of a hard life made brutal through testosterone poisoning. The Queen's plans for him are inscrutable to a man who is heir to and deeply indentified with the rising militant city-state of Athens. The subtle refinements and gender equity of Crete he views as weaknesses, and, alas, he is correct. When the end is upon them, the Cretans, abandoned by their gods, have only their honor to sustain them, where as the Greeks' honor restrains them not at all. "This is a book for a serious reader and a lover of ancient history. Complex, disturbing, subtle, with the ring of truth." |
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