Thursday, November 26, 2009
'The first Pilgrims of the first American Thanksgiving'
Jeremy Bangs, curator of American Pilgrim Museum in Holland and former curator of Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, is waging a campaign to portray the original Pilgrims in a more favorable light, after decades of their being ridiculed as intolerant boobs and religious nuts.
Nathanial Philbrick made roughly the same argument in his book ‘Mayflower’: The Pilgrims who landed in Plymouth partly owed their survival to cultural and religious tolerance they learned in Holland, making them more pragmatic and flexible once they crash landed here, though Philbrick didn’t sugar-coat the Pilgrims’ obvious flaws and weaknesses. …
P.S. -- Bangs is also critical of the way his old Plymouth employer has apparently stripped Puritan religious beliefs and motivations from the recreated plantation, though I’m not keen on going down that culture-wars road today.
Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the day.
Jeremy Bangs, curator of American Pilgrim Museum in Holland and former curator of Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, is waging a campaign to portray the original Pilgrims in a more favorable light, after decades of their being ridiculed as intolerant boobs and religious nuts.
Nathanial Philbrick made roughly the same argument in his book ‘Mayflower’: The Pilgrims who landed in Plymouth partly owed their survival to cultural and religious tolerance they learned in Holland, making them more pragmatic and flexible once they crash landed here, though Philbrick didn’t sugar-coat the Pilgrims’ obvious flaws and weaknesses. …
P.S. -- Bangs is also critical of the way his old Plymouth employer has apparently stripped Puritan religious beliefs and motivations from the recreated plantation, though I’m not keen on going down that culture-wars road today.
Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the day.
