He engineered an escape and returned to his people on Martha’s Vineyard. Or in 1614, when a Nauset (Cape Cod) tribe member named Epenow was captured by Europeans and kept in bondage for three years. As Silverman writes in his book, future annual encounters between the two would follow this same, high-tension pattern. Or 1602, when Bartholomew Gosnold visited Cape Cod and what’s now known as Martha’s Vineyard, where contact with the Wampanoag started with trading and ended in violence. The story could start a century earlier, in 1524, at the first known contact between Native Americans in southern New England and Europeans, in Narragansett Bay near Aquidneck Island. It also is not the one you’ll find at Pilgrim Memorial Park in Plymouth, home of the famed Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower II, a replica of the cargo ship turned people carrier the Pilgrims crammed into to cross the Atlantic. The historically accurate story of the Pilgrims and the founding of Plymouth Colony 400 years ago this month is not in most school history books. Kennedy, whose family frolicked in the home of the native Nauset and Aquinnah people on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, immortalized them in his own Thanksgiving Day proclamation, baking the plaits together like the bread broken and shared in the mythic first Thanksgiving feast. In 1963, these two tracks crossed when President John F. ![]() ![]() ![]() Regardless of whether it was rooted in historical fact, it became accepted as such. On a parallel track, the story of the Pilgrim forefathers coming to the New World and founding America for religious freedom gained steam, as New England Protestants wielded the myth to gain the top spot in the country’s cultural hierarchy, above Catholics and immigrants, according to historian David Silverman in his book “This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving.”Īs Americans looked for an origin story that wasn’t soaked in the blood of Native Americans or built on the backs of slavery, the humble, bloodless story of the 102 Pilgrims forging a path in the New World in search of religious freedom was just what they needed, according to Silverman.
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