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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Something You Should Know · The Real Story of Thanksgiving - Bonus Holiday Episode · 12 Nov 2025
podcast
In 1623, according to his sort of definitive history, or most of the definitive history of the region,
Governor Bradford writes that they had another meal, and this one he actually calls, he actually says, and there was, we gave thanks.
This was a meal of thanksgiving.
There were days of giving thanks to God, to the pilgrims, thanking their God.
That would happen sporadically, in part because the pilgrims who go to New Plymouth in 1620
followed by the Puritans who go to Massachusetts Bay starting in 1630, they tended to see the world as the unfolding of a divine plan.
They were what we call providentialists.
They believed in predestination.
And so everything that happened, as they wrote about it, was sort of, you know, this is what had been intended.
And so they would thank God when good things happened, and they would thank God when unfortunate things happened, because it was in their nature to sort of acknowledge providence.
what they saw was this divine power over them.
Thanksgiving as a holiday doesn't really begin to come in in any grander sense until during the Revolutionary War when the revolutionaries at some point celebrate something, say, well, we should have a day of Thanksgiving.
And then it sort of becomes sort of a sporadic idea
And then it finally only becomes a national holiday during the Civil War in 1863.
You know, a very different context from what was going on in early colonial New England.
What we know...
is that in 1621, the Wampanoags on the one hand and the Pilgrims on the other hand got together for a three-day feast.
And we know that two years later in his history, Bradford writes of a day, another harvest sort of festival or meal in which they give thanks, although he doesn't talk about hosting native neighbors during that.
He then doesn't really write about it again, and he writes the definitive history
which stretches from the founding of New Plymouth in 1620 to about 1650 when he stopped running.
Showing 61–80 of 124 · page 4 of 7
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