- Panel discussion: January 25, 2022, 12 PM EST
- Click here to join the free event on Zoom!
- Event sponsored by The American Book Center in Amsterdam, and managed by Harvard Book Store
Before sailing to America in 1620, the Pilgrims found refuge from persecution in England in the Dutch city of Leiden. There they enjoyed freedoms unavailable at home – freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom to build their own self-governed community. In this period these freedoms were threatened in Holland too by radical protestants. What might their search for freedom teach us today?
Please join a virtual conversation about the light and darkness that these radical separatists brought to their New World, from Puritan William Brewster’s enlightening library of 400 books, to William Stoughton’s dark presence as judge at the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, up to treaty violations on the part of today’s U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Learn about the fascinating precolonial time in Leiden and in Massachusetts, and the brave and radical separatists who settled the New England coast in the 1600s, from highly experienced panelists:
Dr. Jeremy Bangs is Director of the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum and former Chief Curator of Plimoth Plantation Museum. A specialist in the 16th- and 17th-century history of Leiden and of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, he has written numerous articles in professional journals (Oud Holland, Sixteenth Century Journal, Church History, Museum History Journal, etc.) and 20 books about Plymouth’s colonists and Native tribal land, as well as 8 other books on historical and art historical topics. His most recent books are New Light on the Old Colony – Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration (Brill, 2020), and Josias Wompatuck and the Titicut Reserve of the Mattakeeset-Massachusetts Tribe (Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, 2021). Bangs was knighted in 2017 (Ridder in de Orde van Oranje Nassau) and in 2021 received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the 5th Annual International Indigenous Peoples Cultural Conference.
Dr. Cor Smit, PhD is a Leiden independent historian and author of many books and articles on Leiden history, from the Town Charter in the 1200s up to very recent changes. In 2021 he published a City Walk on the development of Human Rights (1200-present); a shorter version of this walk is available as an English spoken app, here.
Richard Warren Brewster, J.D., is a mediator and lawyer in New York City. He received his B.A. in the Classics from Princeton and his law degree from Harvard Law School. He is the author of Witchcraft Legacy: Stories from the Big Attic, available from the American Book Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlandsand from the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Moderator: Laura Fillmore, Publisher, Protean Press. A question-and-answer period will follow the panel discussion; please submit questions in the chat window.
For more information, contact: lynn@abc.nl and/or info@proteanpress.com
NB: A five-part documentary entitled “In the Wake of the Mayflower” is airing now on Friday evenings on Dutch TV. To watch all or parts of it, click here and then click on on the orange bar. The host, Leo Blokhuis, takes the viewer to Delfshaven, Leiden, the Pilgrim Museum, and to England where he interviewed the current resident of the William Brewster house… lots of Brewster references.