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 seventeenth-century 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.