In: Economics
Why does the United States look back to the Pilgrims
for its mythology?
The Mayflower brought the group of English settlers now known as
the Pilgrims to North America. Leaving England in the fall of 1620,
the Pilgrims were attempting to land near the mouth of the Hudson
River, but instead ended up in Cape Cod Harbor. Plymouth, the
colony established there by the Pilgrims in 1621, became the first
permanent European settlement in New England. The story of the
Pilgrims and their harvest feast has since become one of best-known
in American history, but you may not know it as well as you think.
Discover the facts behind these well-known Thanksgiving myths. The
Pilgrims were the English settlers who came to North America on the
Mayflower and established the Plymouth Colony in what is today
Plymouth, Massachusetts, named after the final departure port of
Plymouth, Devon. Their leadership came from the religious
congregations of Brownists, or Separatist Puritans, who had fled
religious persecution in England for the tolerance of 17th-century
Holland in the Netherlands.They held Puritan Calvinist religious
beliefs but, unlike most other Puritans, they maintained that their
congregations should separate from the English state church. They
eventually determined to establish a new settlement in the New
World and arranged with investors to fund them. They established
Plymouth Colony in 1620, which became the second successful English
settlement in America, following the founding of Jamestown,
Virginia, in 1607. The Pilgrims' story became a central theme in
the history and culture of the United States. It’s been taught that
the Pilgrims came because they were seeking religious freedom, but
that’s not entirely true, Mr. Loewen said.
The Pilgrims had religious freedom in Holland, where they first
arrived in the early 17th century. Like those who settled
Jamestown, Va., in 1607, the Pilgrims came to North America to make
money, Mr. Loewen said. “They were also coming here in order to
establish a religious theocracy, which they did,” he said. “That’s
not exactly the same as coming here for religious freedom. It’s
kind of coming here against religious freedom.”Also, the Pilgrims
never called themselves Pilgrims. They were separatists, Mr. Loewen
said. The term Pilgrims didn’t surface until around 1880.They had
an estimated population of at least 15,000 in the early 1600s, and
lived in villages on the Massachusetts coast and inland. Their help
enabled the English to survive, and also became the basis for the
much-mythologised first Thanksgiving feast, still celebrated in the
US as a national holiday, though not without controversy. The
reality, as this exhibition shows, was far more complicated – and
violent.