Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made ... will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

In the Plymouth chapter of <em>Seasons of Misery </em>(2013), Donegan frames her analysis around a quotation from Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford: “the living were scarce able to bury their dead.”

For Bailyn, the experiences attending the British settlement of North America were “not mainly of triumph, but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and to recapture lost worlds, in the process tearing apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded.”

These paradoxes found their way into my current research interest in tracing reverberations of seventeenth-century New England in other times and in other places. How do early twentieth-century women’s clubs appropriate the figure of Anne Hutchinson? Why does John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” address retain so much appeal in a secular and political context for Ronald Reagan? More broadly, why and how do the stories we tell about the English settlement of North America continue to shape and inform U.S. self-image?

That would probably be bad manners, not to mention bad pedagogy. But imagining this confrontation with figurines that offer a cheery and whitewashed version of a complex and violent historical moment follows the pattern of many contemporary renditions of early American culture. It is nice to have the public paying attention to early America, but it would be nice if they were paying more or better attention.

If we can’t do this work in the parking lot, what about the classroom? Does the proliferation of a willfully idealized and ethnically cleansed version of what might be the most complicated holiday on the calendar offer early Americanists a teachable moment? If it does, the opportunity is less a question of killjoy debunking and more of an occasion to reflect on the power of the Thanksgiving narrative—a power that allows a story from early seventeenth-century New England to leap hundreds of years and hundreds of miles to take root in mutant form in a grocery chain in the deep south in the twenty-first century. For starters, it is worth noting that Thanksgiving is a story of racial reconciliation all the more compelling for its conclusion at the dinner table, rather than in the bedroom.

For these holidays say much less about who we really were in some specific Then, than about who we <i>want</i> to be in an ever changing Now.

lmost everything we know about the first Thanksgiving in 1621 is based on a few lines from a letter.

Like most Pilgrims, Winslow suffered personal loss in the early years of the settlement. His first wife Elizabeth died in March, 1621. Barely six weeks later, Winslow married Susanna White, whose husband had died as well. It was the first marriage in the new colony and produced five children.

And while I agree that elementary-school children who celebrate the first Thanksgiving in their classrooms are too young to hear the truth, educators need to share Thanksgiving facts in all American schools sometime before high school graduation.

The first Thanksgiving was not a “thanksgiving,” in Pilgrim terms, but a “rejoicing.” An actual giving of thanks required fasting and quiet contemplation; a rejoicing featured feasting, drinking, militia drills, target practice, and contests of strength and speed. It was a party, not a prayer, and was full of people shooting at things. The Indians were Wampanoags, led by Ousamequin (often called Massasoit, which was a leadership title rather than a name). An experienced diplomat, he was engaged in a challenging game of regional geopolitics, of which the Pilgrims were only a part. While the celebrants might well have feasted on wild turkey, the local diet also included fish, eels, shellfish, and a Wampanoag dish called <em class="">nasaump</em>, which the Pilgrims had adopted: boiled cornmeal mixed with vegetables and meats. There were no potatoes (an indigenous South American food not yet introduced into the global food system) and no pies (because there was no butter, wheat flour, or sugar).

In 1841, the Reverend Alexander Young explicitly linked three things: the 1621 “rejoicing,” the tradition of autumnal harvest festivals, and the name Thanksgiving. He did so in a four-line throwaway gesture and a one-line footnote. Of such half thoughts is history made.

A couple of decades later, Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of <em class="">Godey’s Lady’s Book</em>, proposed a day of unity and remembrance to counter the trauma of the Civil War, and in 1863 Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be that national holiday, following Young’s lead in calling it Thanksgiving. After the Civil War, Thanksgiving developed rituals, foodways, and themes of family—and national—reunion.

Fretting over late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration, American mythmakers discovered that the Pilgrims, and New England as a whole, were perfectly cast as national founders: white, Protestant, democratic, and blessed with an American character centered on family, work, individualism, freedom, and faith.

Silverman begins his book with a plea for the possibility of a “critical history.” It will be “hard on the living,” he warns, because this approach questions the creation stories that uphold traditional social orders, making the heroes less heroic, and asking readers to consider the villains as full and complicated human beings. Nonetheless, he says, we have an obligation to try.

By 1670, the immigrant population had ballooned to sixty or seventy thousand in southern New England—twice the number of Native people.

Thanksgiving’s Pilgrim pageants suggest that good-hearted settlers arrived from pious, civilized England. We could remember it differently: that they came from a land that delighted in displaying heads on poles and letting bodies rot in cages suspended above the roads. They were a warrior tribe.

This evidence, previously unreported, suggests that the man who would become America’s first president might have been more complicated a leader—and more culpable for starting a seven-year-long global war—than history has led us to believe.

As the French philosopher Voltaire wrote around the time of the Jumonville affair: “So complicated are the political interests of the present times that a shot fired in America shall be the signal for setting all Europe together by the ears.”

The French portrayed Washington’s ambush as the brutal murder of a diplomatic official.

“A Treaty with the Indians at Camp Mount Pleasant October 18th 1754.”

Unity was much on Winthrop’s mind. Even though we might think of the Puritans as a homogeneous group, they were actually quite diverse, not in the ways we use that term today but in their theological beliefs and in the ways they experienced and expressed their faith. All embraced God’s love, for example, but in some that bred humility, in others arrogance. All were members of the Church of England. Some wanted to reform its rituals and teachings; others wanted to overthrow them completely. As one scholar has written, “Puritans disagreed on a whole host of matters… from the celebration of Christmas to the forms of burial.”⁵

If unity was much on Winthrop’s mind, so, too, was failure. He knew that the differences among his followers could tear the colony apart. Failure would signify that the Puritans had no “covenant” with God, that God had not given them a special “commission,” in short, that they had not been chosen to establish God’s kingdom in America. Many back home saw the Puritans as either blasphemous fanatics or deserters in the battle to reform the Church of England in England. Failure would vindicate those enemies and forever shame Winthrop and his followers. When he rose to preach, failure was much on his mind.