The Mayflower Compact by Jamie Kallio

On Wednesday, I reviewed Written in Bone by Sally M. Walker, a book for youth about the Jamestown and St. Mary's colonies. I had ancestors in both. Let's move north along the Atlantic Coast to Plymouth Colony today, where I had some other ancestors. Jamie Kallio, a librarian who used to work with us at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library and now works for the Orland Park Public Library has written The Mayflower Compact, a volume in the Foundations of Our Nation series for ABDO Publishing Company.

Jamie, who has long expressed a love of history, introduces the subject of American democracy in this book aimed at 3rd through 6th grade readers. She sets the stage by telling about the Pilgrims sailing across the Atlantic and how they arrived in America hundreds of miles away from their destination of the Virginia Colony. Recognizing that they were not keeping to the charter that they had been given by the Crown by remaining in what became New England, the Pilgrims and the Strangers wrote the Mayflower Compact in 1620, creating the first representative government in North America.

The title seems a bit narrower than the actual content of the book, as Jamie also tells us about life in the Plymouth Colony and adds an account of the war with the Wamponoag in 1674-1676. She notes that the Mayflower Compact was terminated by the incorporation of the Plymouth Colony into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691. Jamie includes a timeline, a glossary, and questions for student research. The Mayflower Compact is a useful primer for elementary students or even for adults looking for the basic facts in an understandable context.

Jamie is continuing to write nonfiction for children. I look forward to seeing her just published books about Virginia and Alabama, as well as another about the immigration station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay.

Kallio, Jamie. The Mayflower Compact. ABDO Publishing Company, 2013. 48p. ISBN 9781617837111.