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• 2024 SPRING LUNCHEON MEETING

  • When
    4 May 2024
  •  
    12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
  • Location
    Ford's Colony Country Club, 240 Ford's Colony Drive, Williamsburg, VA
  • Spaces left
    12
  • Registered
    88 registrants

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  Traditionally we hold two statewide luncheon meetings each year. Our Spring Meeting is held on the first Saturday in May, and our “Compact Day” meeting is held the Saturday before Thanksgiving each November.

  Spring 2024 Luncheon with Richard Pickering

  “Plymouth Colony's Contribution to the Bill of Rights”

  Historian Pauline Meier characterized our Nation’s founding documents as American Scripture. Certainly, the Mayflower Compact takes chronological priority in the sacred texts of America’s civil religion. In the absence of a royal charter and faced with mounting shipboard dissension because the Mayflower landed north of the colony’s legal destination in Northern Virginia, key passengers initiated the organization of a government and legal structure by formulating a self-declared “combination” in which the necessity of forming a “civil body politic” was set forth.

  Join historian Richard Pickering as he describes Plymouth Colony as a place of political creativity and improvisation in the face of challenges and opportunities. It was a birthplace of self-government in the British Atlantic World and played a critical role in this country’s constitutional tradition. The Mayflower Compact  was only the beginning of a groundbreaking seventy-two-year experiment in civil government and the search for individual spiritual liberties. It is an experiment that can shine a light for us today.

  Here is the Pilgrim Pledge that all our "cousins" read in unison at the start of each of our luncheon meetings:

  

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