{"id":340,"date":"2014-09-09T14:00:42","date_gmt":"2014-09-09T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/?p=340"},"modified":"2016-09-11T20:18:05","modified_gmt":"2016-09-11T20:18:05","slug":"taking-on-thanksgiving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/2014\/09\/09\/taking-on-thanksgiving\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking on Thanksgiving"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pilgrims-and-indians-and-turkey\"Thanksgiving myths? \u00a0Say it ain’t so! \u00a0Yet in History 117, students are reading a handful of short, insightful essays by Edward O’Donnell<\/a> and Charles Mann<\/a>\u00a0that help situate the traditional story of Thanksgiving into a more complicated narrative borne\u00a0in the shadows of the Columbian Exchange. \u00a0Those with a particular interest in the Pilgrims might also appreciate this longer article<\/a> by John Humins (available via JSTOR) on the\u00a0\u00a0complicated political and diplomatic intrigue behind the scenes of the first Thanksgiving in 1621. \u00a0When Pilgrim separatists arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, they thought they were settling in Northern Virginia. \u00a0In some ways, they found a similar dynamic with Wampanoag Indians as John Smith and the Jamestown settlers had discovered several years earlier with the Powhatan Indians. \u00a0In other words, as foreigners they were originally sized up as pawns in the political and imperial battles of the indigenous populations. \u00a0Humins focuses his attention on the tensions between two Indians: \u00a0Squanto and Massasoit.<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>In class, we also discussed ways to use the\u00a0Thanksgiving\u00a0story as an illustration of the evolving Puritan worldview. \u00a0At first, Puritans held many days of prayer, fasting and thanksgiving, but they avoided celebrations of Christmas and Easter. \u00a0Puritan settlements in New England expanded rapidly throughout much of\u00a0the seventeenth century, offering the world a “city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop famously called it, but also soon demonstrated the tensions in applying the dictates of covenant theology to the realities of everyday life. \u00a0The civil wars in England, as well as pressures from the Indians and mercantile trade, eventually conspired to shift the strict Calvinist dogma of the Puritan faithful into a more secular “Yankee” culture. \u00a0Religious faith still mattered in Puritan (now Congregational) New England, but\u00a0so did other values.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanksgiving myths? \u00a0Say it ain’t so! \u00a0Yet in History 117, students are reading a handful of short, insightful essays by Edward O’Donnell and Charles Mann\u00a0that help situate the traditional story of Thanksgiving into a more complicated narrative borne\u00a0in the shadows … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}