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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. As we head toward Thanksgiving, I want to give thanks for and to all the people from A to Z who have helped make this show this year and this fall, some for years, some for the last few weeks, and we do have them from A to Z. Producers, Amina Srna, Lisa Allison, Max Bolton, Carl Boisrond, Mary Croke with a C. We have Zoe Azulay with two A's and two Z's in her name, Zoe Azulay, and Zach Gottehrer-Cohen. Thank you all from Amina to Zack.

At the audio controls, making it all, well, let's say have the illusion of being seamless, it's usually Juliana Fonda and sometimes Liora Noam-Kravitz, Milton [unintelligible 00:00:59], Sean [unintelligible 00:01:01] or Matt [unintelligible 00:01:02], even Jason Isaac once in a while as he ponders all the ways The Mets have disappointed him. Megan Ryan is always a guiding light as head of live radio. Our interns this fall are Prerna Choudhry and James O'Donnell, and of course listeners, we're always thankful to you for the ways you engage with the show and for giving us the gift of your attention for a chance to do something that means something for you and your community. We hope we earn your attention. Thank you for being there. Happy Thanksgiving.

Did you know that this is not just any Thanksgiving? It's the 400th anniversary of the so-called first Thanksgiving in 1621. With us now is historian, Kenneth C. Davis, author of The Don't Know Much About series of history books. One of them is called America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of The First Pilgrims, Fighting Women and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation. With what is known about the real Thanksgiving origin story and to bust some of the myths, Ken is joining us now. We'll have a call-in for retail workers as you get ready for Black Friday and as Amazon workers in 20 countries plan a Black Friday strike. Hi Ken, happy 400th anniversary.

Kenneth C. Davis: Hi, Brian. Thank you. I am sure I speak for many listeners who will add your name to the list that you just read, thank you for all the work you do. We all appreciate it. It's a great program and we've enjoyed our conversations for a long time. I'm very grateful to be part of it, so thank you.

Brian Lehrer: That's very nice, thank you. Ken, if April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?

Kenneth C. Davis: Pilgrims. Yes, that's what they taught us back in kindergarten, when they were also teaching us how to put our hand down and make a turkey, which could also look like Native American feathers. That's the pageant version that a lot of us got and stayed around for a long time. I think in recent years, we've moved away from it but people are still very confused by what this holiday is all about, especially newcomers to the country.

I've always argued that Thanksgiving is very much an immigrants' holiday. The Pilgrims and Puritans, and we should explain the difference, were immigrants. The people who marched in the first Macy's Day Parade, Thanksgiving Day Parade 95 years ago, were largely European immigrants. This was following a European tradition, that you had a big march parade through town to celebrate the harvest and that's what this is all about. Celebrating the harvest, and being grateful to have made it through another year, and going into the dark days of winter.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go through some of the particulars of what's true and what's myth. You're right that half the passengers on the Mayflower were not Pilgrims at all. What the heck is a Pilgrim anyway?

Kenneth C. Davis: Yes, let's start with the basics here that the Mayflower arrives off the coast of New England in late November, December of 1620. A really lousy time to start a colony in Massachusetts. They wander around Cape Cod for a little bit after signing a document called The Mayflower Compact, which is essentially the first written constitution in what would become the future United States of America, committing to a democratic system of making decisions. Of course, the women weren't included. These were adult men who signed the Mayflower Compact.

These 102 passengers had come, about half of them were what we would call Pilgrims. That's not what they call themselves, that was later applied to them. The other half were people who were coming for opportunity. Some of them were indentured servants, people who had signed on for passage to come to a new colony in this so-called New World, and they had agreed to work for a number of years in exchange eventually for land if they survived, which many of them did not.

The Mayflower anchors in a harbor, they call it Plymouth Harbor. The native people who had been living there called it Patuxet. When the people get off the Mayflower, they find mostly bleached bones. This village has been deserted, it had been wiped out by one of the many epidemics that struck Native Americans, Indigenous people after the arrival of Europeans. We're not sure what specific epidemic it was in Patuxet, but it had wiped out the village.

They then come ashore, they set up a communal house for starters. The Mayflower remains anchored, it would remain there until March because it couldn't sail back across the North Atlantic in December in the winter. This is the beginning of a communal society. It's a very, very harsh first few months. Certainly, by the time the following October rolls around, nearly half of the Mayflower's passengers are dead. It was difficult, starvation, exposure, disease. It was obviously a difficult time.

Brian Lehrer: This first Thanksgiving, did they do it on the fourth Thursday in November?

Kenneth C. Davis: They did not do it on the fourth Thursday in November. We're not quite sure when they did it, but more likely a date in October, which is when the Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving. We have two references, contemporary references to this so-called Thanksgiving, which to the Pilgrims would've meant something very different. Thanksgiving would've meant a day of prayer and fasting, not what most of us have in mind for tomorrow.

To them, this was a harvest feast. They were celebrating bringing in the first crops, which had indeed been brought in with the assistance of the native people who had allied themselves with these Pilgrims, including a man has come down in history as Squanto or perhaps Tisquantum. He walked into camp one day and was able to speak English. It must've been like a Martian landing and speaking English to us. Because here was this savage coming into their village, and they didn't know what to expect and he greets them in English. How did Squanto learn English? They didn't tell us that in [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Pilgrim, "Savage." It would be more like we landed on Mars and suddenly one of the Martians is speaking English to us.

Kenneth C. Davis: Something like that, something like that. Thank you for that correction. Certainly, the use of "Savage" was very much the view that these Englishmen had of the native people they were encountering, who certainly kept them alive. As I said, Squanto speaks English. How did he learn English? About five years earlier, he had been taken captive by an English sea captain, taken first to Spain, sold into slavery, makes his way to London, is working in a shipyard, and is discovered there by someone who thinks that this Native American who can speak English would be an asset to any other voyages that he's going to make.

Squanto, after five years away, returns to New England. It is his village, Patuxet, that the Pilgrims have landed in, his village which has been wiped out of people. He survived because he wasn't there during the epidemic. It's really such an extraordinary story. The real story is so much more interesting.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting and also so tragic from the Squanto point of view. He's kidnapped and taken into slavery in Europe, away five years. Bad enough, he finally gets to come home by sailing on this ship with an exploring expedition because he was able to speak English. When he comes back home, he finds his entire village had been wiped out by a pandemic.

Kenneth C. Davis: Completely wiped. Yes, completely wiped out. Of course, living in a pandemic, we are very, very cognizant of how disease affects history, never more so than in the early history of the exploration, and colonization, and exploitation of the Americas first by the Spanish and later Europeans who followed them who all introduced diseases to which native indigenous population had very little natural immunity. That's why they were such devastating epidemics.

In New England, for instance, a few years later, when the great wave of Puritans, and we still have to sort that out, Puritans follows the Pilgrims. John Winthrop, the famous governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, talks about how the natives have been wiped out by smallpox for 300 miles around. He clearly sees this as the hand of God intervening on his behalf and on behalf of the Puritan settlers, that "This is God's will to wipe these natives out so that we can come in and have this land." That was the attitude. That's what he expressed in a letter of 1630 writing back to London.

Brain Lehrer: Wow. Listeners your questions about the true history of Thanksgiving for historian Kenneth C. Davis, author of the Don't Know Much About History series of books, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet a question @BrianLehrer. If any native Americans are listening, how do you observe this holiday considering all that happened leading up to it and afterwards? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Now, Ken to take a detour from that Massachusetts story, you've written that the real first Pilgrims were French in Florida, 50 years before the Mayflower. It did not end with a happy meal, it ended in a religious massacre. What was that's for?

Kenneth C. Davis: That's correct. Long before the Pilgrims sail to Massachusetts, a group of French Protestants known as Huguenots had failed to what is now Florida and established a colony called Fort Caroline, which was right near modern-day Jacksonville. The Spanish, of course, Catholic Spanish king, did not take lightly to these Protestants who were also pirates, and so he sent a force, an armada, over, essentially, to wipe them out. That was the reason that St. Augustine is founded. They leave that out of the St. Augustine description when they talk about the first mass being celebrated. This was essentially a seek and destroy mission.

The Spanish wipe out the French colony at Fort Caroline, which was certainly founded with much of the same reason. This goes back to the fact that all of these early Pilgrims were part of the religious wars that were being fought across Europe for centuries since the Reformation had begun. In England, that had meant, of course, the King Henry VIII, had broken with the Catholic Church, established himself as both head of state and head of the Church.

The Church of England had moved away from Catholicism, broken with the Pope, but many Englishmen still felt it was too popish or too Papist and they felt it needed to be purified, hence they were called Puritans. The people we call Pilgrims wanted to go a step further. They thought that the Church of England was beyond reform, and they wanted to break away from it completely. There were dissenters. They were separatists. They had actually been forced out of England, went to Holland for 10 years before deciding then to come to America.

That's essentially the difference between Pilgrims and Puritans. The Puritans followed the Pilgrims in a great migration over the next 10 years or so from 1620 to 1630 and, eventually, Pilgrims are absorbed by the Puritans and beginning that Congregational Church in New England, and a part of a very, very rich tradition of what that means for New England.

The story of the French in Florida is that all of this was really begun out of tremendous religious warfare, tremendous religious intolerance. Certainly, the French in Florida would have celebrated some kind of Thanksgiving as well, a harvest festival, just as the Englishmen in Virginia did in 1619, again before the Pilgrims arrived. The first Thanksgiving is dated to that now very notable year of 1619.

Brain Lehrer: Right. If this 2021 is the 400th anniversary of the so-called first Thanksgiving, obviously, the 400th anniversary recently that many more Americans are aware of than they were a few years ago, before the New York Times 1619 project is 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were delivered to Jamestown. How different were the Massachusetts and Virginia settler populations?

Kenneth C. Davis: They were different in terms of their religion in terms of what they were looking for. Certainly, the Pilgrims, those who were specifically Pilgrims came primarily in search of their own religious freedom. In Virginia, it was really much more about an economic enterprise. I should point out that it certainly was for the Pilgrims as well and they became very, very good traders with the Native Americans, especially in beaver, which became the real, just as tobacco would become the cash crop in Virginia, beaver fur became the cash product in New England. When we think about history, we tend not to think too much about things like codfish, and beaver, and tobacco, but these are really the prime movers in this early period of American history.

Brian, the other point about the French, of course, is that it was written out of history books. Most people, including people in Florida, never heard of these French Protestants who settled there and certainly would have celebrated the Thanksgiving. It was a ugly piece of history that didn't fit in with the neat narrative we like to tell, and that's part of what the 1619 issue is right now. We're having a real fight over who gets to tell the history, which history we tell, and how accurate it is. I've been arguing for many years, and we've talked about it, that we have to tell a real history, an accurate history if we're going to have a meaningful sense of what these stories mean to where the country is today.

Brain Lehrer: You talked about even people in Florida, not knowing that history of those settlers who came to Florida 50 years before the Mayflower. Happened to be getting a call from Florida, so let's just check it out, sample of one. Peter in St. Petersburg, you're on WNYC. Peter. Hi, Peter and did you grow up in Florida, and did you learn about those French settlers?

Peter: No, I'm a New Yorker and so are my relatives down here. They're migrants from New York, and I'm sure they don't know, but I've got something to talk about tomorrow. I'm going to do my research. French settlers where did they land in Florida?

Brain Lehrer: Can you set [crosstalk] now?

Kenneth C. Davis: Yes, I think it was called the [inaudible 00:18:30]. It would be near what is now Jacksonville and the settlement was called Fort Caroline. This is also memorialized in a sense if you go just a little bit south of St. Augustine there is a place called Fort Matanzas. Matanzas means slaughters in Spanish. This was all site at which-- Slaughters, Matanzas, M-A-T-A-N-Z-A-S. This is the site where hundreds of French sailors were put to the sword by the Spanish admiral who had founded St. Augustine. The Fort is there. It's a National Historic Site. You can go and visit it, and you'll learn a little bit more about this episode that is certainly part of America's hidden history.

Brain Lehrer: Peter you originally called with a question-- [crosstalk] Go ahead, sorry, Peter, go ahead.

Peter: Well, I was going to say St. Augustine is known as the first settlement in North America. Anyway, I was going to mention, I learned this a few days ago that squash, what we call squash, the food, is native. It was indigenous here, although the verb squash existed in Europe. Do you know anything about the foods, what they ate at that first Thanksgiving?

Kenneth C. Davis: We absolutely do, and squash would have been one of the more important ones because it was one of what is traditionally called the three sisters; squash, corn, beans. These were planted together by indigenous people all over North America famously as the three sisters. They were certainly part of the first Thanksgiving, but just to round that out a little bit, we do have a record of this from William Bradford who describes there having gone out and killed wild geese, ducks, and turkey, but wild turkey, not the one we are familiar with.

There was also plenty of seafood at the first Thanksgiving because these people were camped out on the shores of the Atlantic, teaming with Cod, very important in the development of New England. Cod, mussels, lobster perhaps, and eel. I don't know if you have eel on your menu for tomorrow, but it would be historically appropriate. Then the 90 or so Wampanoag warriors who had heard the gunshots from the celebration of the settlers, they show up to find out what's going on. Uninvited guests, but they decide to stay.

They go out and bring back five freshly killed deer so there would have been venison as well at the first Thanksgiving, which I think I may have mentioned, lasted three days with some wrestling and some races being run. Three days is a lot longer than most of us will spend at the table tomorrow.

Brian Lehrer: I guess so. Was there really an event like these three days with some Pilgrims and some indigenous people that seemed like a big enough ceremonial deal at the time that it could be institutionalized as a national holiday as it's been?

Kenneth C. Davis: No. That's really something that emerged much more slowly over traditions and folkloric sense of what happened. The first one in 1621 is barely even noted in the records of the day and they didn't call it Thanksgiving. They actually would have had a true Thanksgiving, which I mentioned earlier meant Day of Prayer and Fasting in 1623. This idea of a big meal to celebrate the harvest, which eventually comes down to us as Thanksgiving started out in New England as a more of a tradition called Founder's Day. It was very much around a traditional English meal less so than the original first Thanksgiving.

This was something that spread out across the country as New Englanders spread out across the country. Did not become the holiday we think of it as today until the civil war, essentially. By then, it was tradition in many places but it wasn't a national tradition. Abraham Lincoln issues the first Thanksgiving Day, proclamation for the last Thursday in November in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War at the behest of a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale a very influential magazine writer, editor.

She was the good housekeeping of her day, and she had been lobbying for this holiday which had been established in states but not nationally. She'd been lobbying it for a long time in this magazine she edited and finally Lincoln relents. It's quite extraordinary to see Lincoln writing about how we should be grateful at this moment in November 1863. We are in the midst of some of the worst times of the Civil War. Gettysburg has happened a few months before Lincoln has just come back from dedicating the cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19th, 1863.

The notion of issuing this proclamation calling for Americans to be grateful and humble, no mention of Pilgrims, no mention of a big meal. It's really a day of true expressing gratitude in a religious sense to providence for what had been given. He repeats that a year later in 1864, and this is the beginning of the annual presidential proclamation of a Thanksgiving Day that then becomes a true national holiday in the 1870s.

Brian Lehrer: With historian Kenneth C. Davis, let's take another call. Sunny, who says they are Navajo in Chi Chil Tah, New Mexico. Sunny, you're on WNYC. Hello from New York. Thank you so much for calling in.

Sunny: Good morning, yá'át'ééh. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you just fine. Thank you so much.

Sunny: Awesome. Listening to this history, I'm thinking of two things. Number one, I'm thinking as Lincoln is giving out the proclamation in 1863, my Nation, the Navajos, were being relocated by the United States Cavalry to Fort Sumner as part of the American process of relocating native nations to different locations for real estate, and eventually becomes part of the United States reservation systems.

Also to note that in my area of the Southwest of what has become Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, it was not part of the United States, but 500 years plus, I'm going to say maybe 530 years ago, we had the Spanish conquistadors of Cortez, and Coronado, and Juan de Oñate come into the Pueblo villages and massacre people. It's a bittersweet holiday that I think exists for only a day of gratitude, whereas many native people live by a solar system of equinoxes and solstices and seasons. Naturally, August, September, October are the designated seasons that we give gratitude for our hard work of planting seeds and harvesting, but also giving great gratitude for all of the deities that have made our harvest possible. All of our history, of course, is just spoken not written.

Brian Lehrer: With so much ugly history, some of which we've been talking about committed by the savages the ones who came from Europe, how do you deal with celebrating Thanksgiving? How do you personally and how to other people who are Navajo or otherwise indigenous?

Sunny: We have to live by the Christian calendar because that's how the economy of the world is regulated. Alongside that, we still incorporate our own traditional practices into the calendar days and years, but at the same time, I think I personally have divested myself of every American holiday because they're not relevant to me. I don't celebrate any of the designated holidays on the calendar. I stick with my traditional calendar. It's not even a paper calendar. I stick with my traditional seasonal acknowledgments.

My mother loved Thanksgiving where my father actually did hunt for a turkey. Once again, that was just cultural. Turkeys were migrating at a certain time of the year, so turkeys were somewhat plentiful. He'd get a turkey, but whenever he got the turkey was when we had a turkey dinner. Right now, we just have to abide by all of the rules and regulations of the state of New Mexico and regarding hunting and so the men have to follow protocol of rules. Normally at this time of year, we would be eating venison, but because of the tremendous environmental crisis that we are experiencing everything is becoming less available naturally in the world. Even some of our foraged seeds and grains and nuts and so we're-

Brian Lehrer: Sunny thank you.

Sunny: -making adjustments. Thank you for your time.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much for your time, please call us again. Ken, what were you thinking listening to Sunny?

Kenneth C. Davis: First of all, thank you for the call and thank you for the reminder for people who haven't heard of it. They may have heard of the Trail of Tears, but a reference she is making is also referred to as the Long Walk of the Navajo people. It's another piece of hidden history that most of us never learned about. I think the thing that comes to mind most immediately, however, is the connection then to, once again, the Pilgrim's first Thanksgiving. The chief who sits down with the Pilgrims in 1621 is known as Massasoit. It was actually his title as opposed to his name.

His son was known as King Philip. That's what the English Anglo-Americans would call him later on. Within a very short period of time, King Philip saw what was happening as the waves of Puritans came in, tens of thousands of them. King Philip eventually leads his people into war with the Anglo-American settlers in what was the bloodiest conflict of colonial New England called King Philip's War. It was very, very devastating, and once again, a piece of the American story that is certainly left out of when we tell the Thanksgiving story, but all too often left out of our history books as well, but a very, very significant aspect of what we think of as American history.

This is the story that's repeated over and over again from the time that Columbus and the later Spanish arrive after 1492, and then the French, and then the English. Wherever they went, this was the story that's repeated. Just as we come to terms with 1619 as an important date, we have to come to terms with 1492 and what that meant as a date in terms of what happened to America after the arrival of Europeans here.

Brian Lehrer: This is the 400th anniversary of the so-called first Thanksgiving, and we thank historian Kenneth C. Davis, author of the Don't Know Much About series of history books. One of them is called America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation. Ken, thank you so much.

Kenneth C. Davis: Thank you, Brian. It's always a pleasure, and happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

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