Longfellow Mixture Candy Box, ca. 1900
Item 10854 info
Maine Historical Society
Longfellow's use of his ancestors' courtship was historically accurate, but The Courtship of Miles Standish is not history.
It is a myth based on historic events.
The poem was also contemporary, drawing on then current American thought.
While Priscilla, seated at her wheel, could not have been carding "wool like a snow-drift" (there were no sheep in Plymouth in the Aldens' time), she was representative of the 1850s idea of women as more than passive domestics.
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