Peter Mancall

speaker

124 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 12 Nov

Peter Mancall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · The Real Story of Thanksgiving - Bonus Holiday Episode · 12 Nov 2025 podcast

They had both described the area.

So knowledge of the area had circulated, including some knowledge of the native peoples of the coast.

And so when we get to the pilgrims arriving in 1620, we want sort of as many people want to look at this holiday and say, well, this is

you know, this sort of first dramatic moment.

But in fact, there had been a history that led up to it, and that history had told the English, had told the Pilgrims what the natives were like, and had benefited the Pilgrims because they arrived in a place where there had been a very productive economy, where there had been cleared fields, where corn was growing, where people had sort of mastered the local environment.

So the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags or with the nearby Massachusetts Indians was not sort of, hi, how are you?

So one of the things that we know that happens is that each of them, that is the Pilgrims on the one hand and the Natives on the other hand, each of them seem pretty eager to trade with the other.

So that initial moment, you know, 1620, 1621, is not a moment of enormous suspicion.

It seems more a moment of sort of, hey, what can you do?

Sort of, hey, what can you do for me?

They greet each other as a source of possibility.

new opportunity not oh I need to be worried about you nor hey let's go sit down and hang out because we're friends it's in this middle ground I mean we have to remember that they can't speak to each other particularly easily there is a language barrier that becomes reduced over time as people learn to communicate but at this point it's still pretty intense and so people are still sort of you know figuring things out and a number of the documents that survive from the period

sort of show us this trepidation, this, you know, how do we reach out?

Well, they, this is the English word, right?

Well, they showed some interest in this thing that we had, you know, glass beads or axe or metal axes.

And we, that is the English, you know, said, well, we're starving and we would really like to eat some of their corn.

And so I think we see people who are trying to

establish relations, and one of the things that we also need to remember is that we tend, it's our natural tendency, to sort of put them in this broad category of Wampanoags or other Algonquin-speaking peoples on the one hand, and English, you know, on the other.

But in fact, there's a lot of individuals going back and forth, and very soon, within a few years, in the 1620s, one group of the English breaks off from the others and has very extensive relations with

with these Indians in the area.

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