The Pilgrims who started the first Thanksgiving tradition after they landed in Plymouth were following the customs they had grown up with, originating in medieval times.
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Articles on Mayflower
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The Puritans had little tolerance for those who didn’t conform to their vision of the world.
Power, plague and Christianity were closely intertwined in 17th-century New England.
Recreating the Mayflower and its crew and passengers from a few vague accounts took a lot of technical know-how.
Puritans were often depicted as fools until they had a shot at government, and then the humour got darker.
Letter writing helped this small but close community continue their way of life.
When a shipload of puritan colonisers set sail for the New World, maritime science and navigation were fairly unsophisticated.
Puritan leaders argued vehemently for a church to be free of any higher authority – which caused problems in England and the new world.
Descendants from the Pilgrims were keen to highlight their ancestors’ role in the country’s founding. But their sanitized version of events is only now starting to be told in full.
A globalization expert shares two surprising tales of how the powerful winds of trans-Atlantic trade affected the quintessentially American holiday.
Top contributors
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Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
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Reader in Early Modern History, University of East Anglia
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Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross
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Head of Engineering, Faculty of Creative Industries, Architecture and Engineering, Solent University
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Distinguished Professor of Management & Global Business, Rutgers University
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Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Fairfield University
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Postdoctoral Researcher in Early Modern Transatlantic History, University of York
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Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, University of Portsmouth
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Chair in Interactive Multimedia Systems, University of Birmingham
