Donna Curtin, PhD and Linda Jeffers Coombs
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag
Donna Curtin, Executive Director of Pilgrim Hall Museum, on the Mayflower passengers’ first year in Plymouth.
[Originally recorded 24 November 2020]
Linda Jeffers Coombs, author and historian, on the Wampanoag’s experience with the pilgrims’ arrival as well as the effects of an epidemic that swept through and devastated the region just before the pilgrims arrived.
[Originally recorded February 4, 2021]
Donna Curtin, PhD, is Executive Director of Pilgrim Hall Museum (pilgrimhall.org). Established in 1820, and the nation’s oldest continuously operating public museum, the Pilgrim Hall Museum embrace a commitment to telling this story with historical accuracy, inclusion, and renewed recognition for histories that traditionally have been submerged, silenced, or erased.
Pilgrim Hall Museum houses an unmatched collection of Pilgrim possessions, revealing the stories of ordinary yet determined men and women building new lives and homes for their families in a new world. Our core focus also encompasses the presence and experiences of the Wampanoag, “People of the Dawn,” the Native People who inhabited this area for 10,000 years before the arrival of the English colonists and who are still here today. Exhibitions and programs trace the story of the interrelationship between the Wampanoag and the early colonial settlers from first encounters through the disastrous conflict of the 1670s, known as King Philip’s War.
