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Another Thanksgiving is upon us. But it’s amazing how ungrateful people can be these days. One comedian quipped, “My grandfather tried to warn everyone that the Titanic was going to sink. Besides not believing him, they also expelled him from the movie theater!”

Here’s the version you were probably taught: The Pilgrims arrived here after an arduous trip across the Atlantic Ocean. They didn’t know why they were, had no idea what to do. They had nothing. The Indians took pity on them. The Indians saw them, and the Indians saved them. The Indians taught ’em how to do things they didn’t know how to do, like grow food, catch beavers, stuff like that. The Indians saved them, and the Pilgrims thanked them by growing a whole bunch of food and having this big feast. So, the story of Thanksgiving that’s taught is...

We all know the Thanksgiving story about the Pilgrims and their first bountiful harvest of 1621. We are taught about the hardships of the first winter season with over half of the early settlers dying in the first year. The Pilgrims were but 40 of the 102 people aboard the Mayflower that landed in Plymouth on the eastern coast of today’s state of Massachusetts. They met Squanto, an English-speaking Indian (for that story see the Nov. 24, 2014 Biblical Viewpoint post) who taught them to how to live off the land and negotiate a treaty with the neighboring Wampanoag tribe...

Rush's last delivery of his classic and famous story of America's First Thanksgiving.

Disney’s Hocus Pocus 2 star Bette Midler spent her Thanksgiving trashing the national holiday, posting a meme that denigrated the pilgrims as “undocumented aliens from Europe.” In a tweet on Thursday, Bette Midler posted a meme showing a pilgrim and an Indian sharing a turkey in what appears to be a depiction of the first Thanksgiving in 1621. The meme’s snarky caption reads: “Celebrating the day Americans fed undocumented aliens from Europe.” Midler’s meme inaccurately depicts what actually transpired between the Plymouth colony pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians at the first Thanksgiving feast. Historical accounts show that both the pilgrims...

Thursday, if you eat a nice meal, thank the Pilgrims. They made Thanksgiving possible. They left the Old World to escape religious persecution. They imagined a new society where everyone worked together and shared everything. In other words, they dreamed of socialism. Socialism then almost killed them. As I explain in my weekly video, the Pilgrims attempted collective farming. The whole community decided when and how much to plant, when to harvest and who would do the work.Gov. William Bradford wrote in his diary that he thought that taking away property and bringing it into a commonwealth would make the...

History of Plimmoth Plantation, 2 volumes, both in this post. You can download them for yourself . History of Plymouth plantation, 1620-1647 by Bradford, William, 1588-1657; Ford, Worthington Chauncey, 1858-1941, editor; Massachusetts Historical Society VOL 1 https://archive.org/details/historyofplymout1162brad/page/n1/mode/2up?q=Of+Plimouth+Plantation History of Plymouth plantation, 1620-1647 by Bradford, William, 1588-1657; Ford, Worthington Chauncey, 1858-1941, editor; Massachusetts Historical Society VOL 2 https://archive.org/details/historyofplymout2162brad/page/n9/mode/2up?q=Of+Plimouth+Plantation

The Littleton Historical Society’s event last week drew a crowd of close to a hundred people to hear a presentation by Littleton resident Daniel Boudillion. His main topic of research concerned the numerous New England locales incorporating the word “Tophet” into their name, in particular eight Massachusetts swamps so named by the Puritans. Illustrating his remarks with slides, Boudillion began by noting that the word “Tophet” was peculiar to the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was chartered in 1629. The Puritan Bible of choice was the Geneva Bible, a translation that used the word Tophet to depict a...

BOSTON (AP) — A former chairperson of the Massachusetts tribe whose ancestors aided the Pilgrims goes on trial Tuesday for bribery, extortion and other federal charges related to the tribe’s planned casino project. Cedric Cromwell’s criminal trial opens in U.S. District Court in Boston after being delayed for months by the coronavirus pandemic. Federal prosecutors say Cromwell used his position as chair of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to extort tens of thousands of dollars in bribes and engaged in a conspiracy to commit bribery. The Cape Cod-based tribe’s casino plan has faced years of legal setbacks, but it got a...

U.S.—New documents recently uncovered by Smithsonian historians confirmed that the group of pilgrims and Indians who gathered for the first Thanksgiving argued vehemently about politics throughout the course of the meal. The newly discovered journal seems to indicate that just after giving thanks for the meal, one Pilgrim from England drank too much mead and began to rant about “making the colonies great again,” kicking off several hours of hostile glances, passive-aggressive remarks, and flat-out argumentation. “Apparently, Uncle Charles was asked to eat at the kids’ table after a tirade about how real patriots need to support King James I,...

The Pilgrims didn’t bring ‘genocide’ to America. They barely brought themselves, with half of their company dying that first winter, in 1620-21.Americans have a great and exuberant tradition that touches our sense of belonging and our pride in coming together. No, I am not referring to Thanksgiving, that festival of gratitude, generosity, and welcome. I am referring to the equally great and exuberant tradition of trash-talking other people. Supposedly we have reformed. Ethnic slurs that were once common have retreated to the dark corners of dive bars and the even darker corners of anti-social media. We live in a time...

And a good pre-Thanksgiving to one and all. Last chance to post your favorite,famous,and/or fabulous Thanksgiving recipes!I thought today I’d simply post Rush’s annual Thanksgiving story. You know, the one Rush used to read from his book See, I Told You So every Thanksgiving Eve. He told the tale in an attempt to stem the tide of anti-capitalism, anti-western civilization, anti-American propaganda inculcating every aspect of culture, beginning with education before spilling over into the rest of society.I did note an increasing proliferation of “Rush’s Thanksgiving tale is a big fat lie!” stories as I was looking for a link....

Socialism, one of history’s worst ideas, has been disproved repeatedly and without exception. Yet it keeps rearing its ugly head — constantly being rebranded as a good idea. Truth is, socialism only benefits the ruling class who implement this form of government theft. Amazingly, early America had an experiment in socialism. The Pilgrim settlers tried socialism for two years — and it nearly killed them. In his book, Socialism: The True History from Plato to the Present, William J. Federer quotes the socialistic bylaws imposed on the Pilgrims by those London merchants who funded the creation of their colony. Under...

Finding Church…”Where Two or more are gathered in My Name”… Church pt 3 Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. ( Matthew 18:19-20)A good many people have written me over the years , asking me to recommend churches in given areas. They tell me they simply cannot find a church that they can...

Of the two communities that confronted each other 400 years ago in New England, it may now be the Indians who most resemble today's Americans.The following essay is part of The Federalist’s 1620 Project, a symposium exploring the connections and contributions of the early Pilgrim and Puritan settlers in New England to the uniquely American synthesis of faith, family, freedom, and self-government.Possibly someone will surprise us at the last minute. Possibly the coronavirus is to blame. But with 2020 nearly over, it looks like the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’s arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts, is going to pass uncommemorated.There have...

Private property rights and personal responsibility saved the Plymouth colony from the edge of extinction and laid the economic foundation for a free and prosperous nation. It is widely known that the early Pilgrims came to the New World to escape religious persecution. What is lesser known is that their spiritual adventure was also a commercial enterprise. Today’s self-identified democratic socialists like to claim real socialism has never been tried in America, but they need to brush up on their history. The Pilgrims did try it — and it failed. In the early 17th century, King James I chartered a...

Freedom is still the reason to come to America and the reason to stay. It’s still something to be thankful for and something to fight for.Four centuries ago, the Pilgrims of the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. They were fleeing religious persecution in the Old World. This is to say they were seeking freedom in the New World. All these years after the Mayflower’s voyage, the world has changed, but the reason to come to America remains the same: freedom. That’s it. That’s the whole deal. Freedom, and the opportunities that come with it. Think about it. Why else would...

Revisionist histories are nearly always written (or posted to the internet) with an agenda in mind — it's no different for the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving.Four hundred years after the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts in November 1620, this Thanksgiving promises to be the most isolated celebration in living memory. Thanks to the internet, however, virtual gatherings will be possible. Thanksgiving in the age of the internet also means, for many amateur historians, debunking the many myths surrounding the story of the original Thanksgiving. This project of correcting the Thanksgiving legend has picked up steam in recent years. It is part of...

The tradition of the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving is steeped in myth and legend. Few people realize that the Pilgrims did not celebrate Thanksgiving the next year, or any year thereafter, though some of their descendants later made a "Forefather's Day" that usually occurred on December 21 or 22. Several Presidents, including George Washington, made one-time Thanksgiving holidays. In 1827, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale began lobbying several Presidents for the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, but her lobbying was unsuccessful until 1863 when Abraham Lincoln finally made it a national holiday. Today, our Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of...

The losses we have experienced from COVID-19 help us understand the Pilgrims. Their courage and faith to give thanks despite hardships can encourage us.How do we know about the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving, and when did we know it? Americans learned for the first time about the Pilgrims from their own writings in 1841 in Alexander Young’s “Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers.” This book published part of the lost writings of William Bradford and a 1621 letter from Edward Winslow.These writings had been published in a 1622 long-lost recruiting pamphlet in England but not in America. Because Winslow’s letter described the 1621...