"Anyone who did not believe what the Pilgrims believed would not have been welcome."Īs for their sober manner of dress, says Travers, our picture is "vastly simplified. They were a democratic people committed to religious freedom … but that religious freedom was their own religious freedom," he says. They did demand a strong allegiance to a code of rules. "They were a small sect they never became a very large group. "They were a pretty serious group," says LeBeau, who hosts a weekly radio program, Talking History. For example, they did not celebrate Christmas, and they believed that no hymns - only psalms - should be sung in church. To begin with, the Pilgrims wouldn't have thought of themselves as Pilgrims, but as godly folk who wanted to worship in their own way. "It's mostly a glossing-over of history," says Carolyn Travers, research manager at Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Mass., that includes a recreation of life in 1627 Plymouth and a replica of the Mayflower. Since most Americans' study of the Pilgrims begins and ends in grade school, their story is simplified. "They were being portrayed as drunken gluttons and routinely accused of being sexually promiscuous." "The way people were imagining the Puritans in England was almost 180 degrees opposite" to the way they are seen today, says Poole, author of Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton. Religious separatists like the Pilgrims - often called Puritans because they believed the Church of England needed to be "purified" of all Roman Catholic influences - were mocked and vilified in the literature of the day, says Kristin Poole, an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware. And it certainly wasn't the way most of their contemporaries thought of them. But our image of the hosts of the first Thanksgiving as somber, gray-clad men wearing hats with buckles took some time to evolve. Well, there weren't any bars in the tiny Plymouth settlement in 1621, so it couldn't have happened that way. 21, 2001 - What if the Pilgrims hadn't invited the Indians to a Thanksgiving feast, but instead took them out to the local tavern and regaled them with boastful tales and lewd jokes?
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