History, Natural History & the Arts
In 1621, the Pilgrims of Plimoth (or Plymouth) Colony and their Wampanoag neighbors came together to celebrate their first harvest. Today we remember this event as the first Thanksgiving.
But what do we really know about this holiday and the people who celebrated it? [Read more…] about The Pilgrims of Plimoth & The First Thanksgiving
The fabled 1621 “First Thanksgiving” celebrated in elementary school plays across the country was reported on by Edward Winslow in Mourt’s Relation (A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England, 1622) and William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation. [Read more…] about Abraham Lincoln’s First Thanksgivings
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the printing of William Shakespeare’s First Folio, one of the key books in the English speaking world.
Published seven years after the playwright’s death, many plays that were never printed in his lifetime, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar, might otherwise not have survived. [Read more…] about A True Tempest: American Passion for Shakespeare & The Fate of a First Folio
The early history of the Dutch in America is not confined to the Hudson River and the surrounding areas, but extends deep into New England. In 1620 a group of settlers from Leiden journeyed across the Atlantic to settle in North America. They are often overlooked in surveys of Dutch-American relations, because their history does not fit neatly into the nineteenth-century nationalist framework that still pervades the historiography.
Yet the Pilgrims of Plymouth — English, but honorary Dutchmen by hindsight — are worthy of our attention. One of the Pilgrims was Edward Winslow, Separatist, Governor, and International Diplomat. His story is told by Jeremy D. Bangs, the expert par excellence of Pilgrim history. [Read more…] about Pilgrim Edward Winslow: Separatist, Governor and International Diplomat