User:Generalissima/Plymouth Rock

A rewrite draft of the page available at Plymouth Rock. Comments in italics because i'm lazy.

History

The Pilgrims

Splitting and relocations

The top portion of the rock was again moved on July 4, 1834. In an Independence Day parade,

Cultural legacy

Seelye is going to be essential to this section. It'll discuss the rock's slow transformation from a icon of veneration into a hated tourist attraction the subject of many a derisive think piece.

Physical description

One third of Plymouth Rock currently lies above ground, with the whole rock weighing about 10 tons.

Geology

Plymouth Rock is a dedham granite boulder, currently weighing about 10 tons. A glacial erratic, the rock formed some distance to the northwest, possibly as far as Boston or Concord.

McPhee opens his essay by citing multiple other, mostly early 20th century theories of the erratic's original source; Laurentian terranes north of the St. Lawrence, (Loring, 1920), Cape Ann (Carnegie, 1923), Cohasset (Shimer, 1951), or Plymouth Bay itself (thereby not making it much of an erratic, Mather, 1952). However, the rest of the essay mentions E-An Zen, who gives the location as "somewhere between Boston and Plymouth". Perhaps this will have to have a bit of a geohistoriography to account for changing interpretations of the rock over time, and McPhee's source certainly counts as analysis of this history.

Fragments

Since a lot of these fragments are from known larger fragments or specific instances where portions of the rock crumbled, this is going to work better as prose going through the timeline of where notable pieces were taken from the rock, rather than a separate list by location held like my original intentions.

A 40-pound piece of the rock is held at the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Initially owned by the Congregational Church of the Pilgrims, it was transferred to the Plymouth Church when the two congregations united in 1934. A smaller fragment is held several blocks away at the Brooklyn Historical Society.

A small fragment is held at Union Chapel in Islington, London, gifted to the church's minister during an 1883 lecture tour in the United States.

References

Bibliography

• McPhee, John (2001). "Travels of the Rock". The Princeton Anthology of Writing: Favorite Pieces by the Ferris/McGraw Writers at Princeton University. Princeton University Press. pp. 351–368. ISBN 978-0-691-23686-5. Retrieved 31 December 2023.

Useful Sources:

• Sargent, Mark L. “Plymouth Rock and the Great Awakening.” Journal of American Studies 22, no. 2 (1988): 249–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27555007.
• Bush, Sargent. “America’s Origin Myth: Remembering Plymouth Rock.” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (2000): 745–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/490199.

• Paul, Heike. “Pilgrims and Puritans and the Myth of the Promised Land.” In The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies, 137–96. Transcript Verlag, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1wxsdq.7.

• Arner, Robert D. "Plymouth Rock Revisited: The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers" American Culture 6, no. 4 (Winter 1983)
• Gambino, Megan, The True Story Behind Plymouth Rock, Smithsonian Magazine, November 22, 2011 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-true-story-behind-plymouth-rock-639690/
• Delabarre, Edmund B. Dighton Rock: A Study of the Written Rocks of New England, 1928 https://archive.org/details/dightonrockstudy00dela
• Seelye, John, Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock, 1998
• Greenhouse, Wendy. "The Landing of the Fathers: Representing the National Past, 1770-1860", Picturing History: American Painting 1770-1930, 1993 https://archive.org/details/cor5_0_s06_ss01_boxrg5_0_2008_025_15/
• McPhee, John, "Travels of the Rock", The New Yorker, February 18, 1990. Republished in Favorite Pieces by the Ferris/McGraw Writers at Princeton University. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1t1kg4j.75
• Hebel, Udo J. “Historical Bonding with an Expiring Heritage: Revisiting the Plymouth Tercentenary Festivities of 1920/21.” In Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century, edited by Jürgen Heideking, Geneviève Fabre, and Kai Dreisbach, 1st ed., 257–97. Berghahn Books, 2001. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1btbxf7.17.
• Ayers, William. Picturing History: American Painting, 1770-1930. 1993
  • Greenhouse, Wendy "The Landing of the Fathers: Representing the National Past, 1770-1860"
• Plymouth Rock Still a Symbol, New York Times, 24 Nov 1985, p. 49
• Plymouth Rock Is Vandalized, New York Times, 14 Aug 1991, p. A.10
• Pieces of Plymouth Rock for sale, Cape Cod Times, 26 Nov, 2005. https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2005/11/26/pieces-plymouth-rock-for-sale/50908761007/
• https://insider.si.edu/2011/11/plymouth-rock-piece-1620/
• Proposed Plymouth Rock National Memorial, National Park Service, Clemson University Libraries, 1969, https://archive.org/details/proposedplymouth00nati
• Rives, T.M. Secret New York: An Unusual Guide. 2018. (Useful because it mentions two pieces of Plymouth Rock in New York City)
• Doss, Erika. “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan: Founders’ Statues, Indian Wars, Contested Public Spaces, and Anger’s Memory in Springfield, Massachusetts.” Winterthur Portfolio 46, no. 4 (2012): 237–70. https://doi.org/10.1086/669736. (incidentally useful)
• Pilgrim Memorial State Park: Cultural landscape https://www.tclf.org/landscapes/pilgrim-memorial-state-park
• Browne, Stephen H. "Reading public memory in Daniel Webster's Plymouth Rock oration." Western Journal of Communication (includes Communication Reports) 57, no. 4 (1993): 464-477.
• Calvo, Clara. "Shakespeare's church and the pilgrim fathers: commemorating Plymouth Rock in Stratford." Critical Survey 24, no. 2 (2012): 54-70.
• Pole, Nelson. "Why Plymouth Rock is Not the Rock of Ages." Philosophy in Context 5 (1976): 42-49.
• Barnett, Teresa. Sacred relics: Pieces of the past in nineteenth-century America. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
• Arner, Robert D. "Plymouth Rock Revisited: The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers." Journal of American Culture 6, no. 4 (1983): 25-35.
• Levinson, Martin H. "Examining ten commonly accepted verbal maps of American history." ETC: A Review of General Semantics 66, no. 4 (2009): 364-370.