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The Truth About The First Thanksgiving By James Loewen

592 Words3 Pages

Did you know your history teachers have lied to you about the first Thanksgiving? In James W. Loewen’s article, “The Truth about The First Thanksgiving,” he discussed all the important information left out of history books. When asking his students when the United States had first settled, he was surprised at the number of students said 1620. All of this confusion, comes from the word “settled” and many other misunderstood events in history. Here are some of the points he made in his article. One event that he pointed out was the fact that the Europeans were never able to actually "settle". They did attempt to settle in China, India, Indonesia, and most of Africa. When trying to settle in those places, they discovered there was already too …show more content…

This event was in all textbooks, but every book describes it differently. Some say the Pilgrim's destination was Virginia, then one man says they wanted to be as far away as they could from Virginia. The textbooks who say their destination was Virginia states that their reasoning was because there was already a British settlement there. In the textbooks there are many different reasons as to why the Pilgrims ended up in Massachusetts. The first reason was that a brutal storm blew their ship of its designated route. The second reason was what they called "error of navigation", that landed them to far north. The man who states that they were not headed for Virginia, George Willison, says they were debating on whether they wanted to go to Guiana or Massachusetts to avoided the Anglican control in Virginia. They knew enough about Massachusetts to think it would be the best place for them to go. They knew about the fishing they offered in Cape Cod, and also the not so appealing plague. Another point that Willison had made was that out of the 102 settlers on the Mayflower, only about thirty-five of them were actually Pilgrims. With all this being said, it is clear that people just really do not know what really went on in history. All historians view the Pilgrims as the people who took the first step toward creating a government, when no one else

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