November 30, 2017
Volume 46 - No. 47
Editor’s Note: Last week you were treated to a story by our prolific author, Friedrich Gomez, dealing with Humor at Thanksgiving. This week we offer a follow-up story - an easy and interesting read, also about Thanksgiving.
It’s a new writer for The Paper and we like his “stuff.” Hope you will as well. by Matthew Fabritius
When most of us hear the word Thanksgiving, we don’t typically think we need an explanation of the holiday’s history. Most if not all of us learned the basic history of this holiday in elementary school through a variety of harvest festivals and class stage plays concerning the 1620 Mayflower ship landing at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. You’re dressed up as a native Indian, someone else as a Pilgrim and of course some other kid has to play the pumpkin or turkey soon to be devoured. We know generally about the myth concerning the Pilgrims and their history, where they came from, why they came to America and what their intentions were once they landed in the New World. However, this myth is largely whitewashed and oversimplified as the Pilgrims were not simply poor souls looking for a better homeland. The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock were largely theocratic Puritans who were driven out of England due to their extremist beliefs regarding Britain’s official state-run church, the Church of England. In essence, the Plymouth Pilgrims believed that the Church of England was rife with leftover corrupt practices from the Catholic Church which needed to be rooted out.
This particular Puritan movement in England traces its political origins back to Robert Browne, a pastor with the Church of England in the late 1500’s who divorced himself from the church for roughly six years. Ironically, he later returned to the church after a career as a school Headmaster and became an Anglican pastor. However, Browne’s moderate, short-lived rebellion against the Church of England went on to The The Paper Paper -- 760.747.7119 760.747.7119
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influence an entire movement of extremist British and AngloAmerican Puritans for the next 200 years throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.
The emergence of the Puritans and their settling of New England provided much of the peasant support for the later American Revolutionary War against the British Empire in 1776. Without the extreme, separatist attitudes of the Puritan settlers whose loyalties to England were already strained, the Founding Fathers would have had a far more difficult
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time leading a successful rebellion against the British crown.
Given the Pilgrims’ extreme, Puritan attitudes, their encounters with the Massachusetts wilderness were quite fitting. Out of the 102 passengers who rode the Mayflower to New England in 1620, roughly half of them died during the winter due to a combination of hypothermia, frostbite, scurvy and disease. The surviving Pilgrims later made contact with the peaceful Wampanoag tribe in March of 1621 and later in autumn held the traditional
Samaritans Continued on Page 2
Thanksgiving celebration we recognize today. We know that the Wampanoags helped the Pilgrims to grow corn and other crops along with teaching them how to perfect the art of hunting wild animals. But who exactly were these Wampanoag good Samaritans? Where did they come from and what happened to them? The Wampanoag natives prominently inhabited the southern portion of Massachusetts from Buzzards Bay to Cape Cod until the end of the 17th century when a massive war with