Plymouth

Scholars are unraveling the myths surrounding the 1621 feast, which found the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag cementing a newly established alliance.

Historian John Turner tells the story of Plymouth Colony with nuance and care.

The word “Plymouth” may conjure up visions of Pilgrims in search of religious freedom, but that vision does not reflect reality.

Most adult men could aspire to participation in the religious and political government of the colony. But this communal liberty did not imply personal liberty.

The forgotten history of Thanksgiving.

From early New England to the present day, censors have acted out of fear, not prudishness.

At the prodding of John and Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren took on a massive project: writing a comprehensive history of the Revolutionary War.

What happened in Virginia four months later mattered much more.

Long marginalized and misrepresented in U.S. history, the Wampanoags are bracing for the 400th anniversary of the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in 1621.

For centuries, everyone from archaeologists to amateurs pillaged artifacts — and human remains. Now, the FBI is cracking down on those who continue to dig.

It was less about their asceticism and more about rejecting the world they had fled.

An ex-minister named John Lyford arrived at the nascent colony hoping for a fresh start. But he couldn’t escape his past.

Descendants of the Pilgrims have highlighted their ancestors’ role in the country’s founding. But their sanitized version of events is only now starting to be told in full.

In 1625, New England’s “hideous and desolate” isolation suddenly began to seem a God-given blessing in disguise.

A now-famous Puritan sermon was nothing special in its own day.

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

Thanksgiving is a holiday about food – but it is more specifically a holiday about food’s absence.

Why Pilgrims would be stunned by our "traditional" Thanksgiving table, and other surprising truths about the invention of our national holiday.

The gap between academic and popular understandings of early American topics is an enduring challenge for early Americanists.

A response to claims that the First Thanksgiving was not a "thanksgiving" as the Pilgrims understood it.

Was the 'first Thanksgiving' merely a pretext for the bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?

A new biography tells a far more complex, nuanced, and, frankly, interesting historical episode than that depicted in the typical grade-school pageant.

The Puritan origins of modern ideas about migration.

Estimates say that millions of dollars and tens of thousands of acres of land throughout New England were given to soldiers who scalped Native Americans.

In the 1960s and ’70s, guides began wearing period costumes and farming with historical techniques, a change that coincided with the back-to-the-land movement.

In a covenantal nation like the United States, words are the very ligaments that hold the body together, and what words we choose become everything.

American artists were instrumental in propagating the false narrative of Thanksgiving, a deliberate erasure of violence against Indigenous peoples.

In New England, the birds were once hunted nearly to extinction; now they’re swarming the streets like they own the place. Sometimes turnabout is fowl play.

How a massacre on March 22, 1622 irrevocably shaped relations between Indigenous Americans and English colonists.

An account of the first female to serve in the U.S. Navy.