The Real History of Thanksgiving Revisited

Cause Before Symptom - With Your Host James Carner

This episode dismantles the American Thanksgiving myth by tracing the true history behind the 1621 feast and the violent decades that followed. Drawing from primary colonial documents, Wampanoag ethnographies, modern scholarship, and eyewitness accounts, the show reveals that the traditional Thanksgiving story is not a tale of friendship and harmony, but a sanitized version of a far more complex and heartbreaking reality. Long before the Pilgrims arrived, the Wampanoag thrived as a sovereign nation with sophisticated agriculture, diplomacy, and spiritual traditions. Their world was shattered by the Great Dying, a pandemic that wiped out ninety percent of the coastal tribes between 1616 and 1619, leaving abandoned villages and mass graves that the Pilgrims interpreted as divine preparation for their settlement.

The episode follows the extraordinary and tragic life of Squanto, the enslaved survivor whose return to a homeland devoid of his people shaped the Pilgrims’ survival. It explores Massasoit’s diplomatic genius as he forged a fragile alliance with the English not out of goodwill but out of geopolitical necessity. It reexamines the real 1621 feast as a tense, armed diplomatic summit rather than the cheerful celebration depicted in children’s books. The story then shifts to the theology of the Puritans, whose Old Testament worldview cast Native peoples as impediments to God’s plan, justifying conquest as a sacred duty.

The narrative intensifies with the Pequot War of 1637, where the massacre at Mystic — the burning alive of men, women, and children — became the first official thanksgiving proclaimed by colonial authorities. From there, the peace of 1621 unravels through land theft, biased courts, missionary pressure, and forced submission. The episode culminates in King Philip’s War, the devastating conflict that ended Wampanoag sovereignty, saw Metacom’s head displayed in Plymouth for twenty years, and reshaped New England forever.

In the end, the show exposes how the Thanksgiving myth was crafted in the 1800s to unify a young nation by burying its violent origins under a tale of harmony. Yet it offers a path forward — urging listeners to honor the truth, remember the people whose survival made the holiday possible, and reclaim gratitude not through myth, but through honesty. Thanksgiving, this episode insists, must become a table of remembrance, not erasure; a place where truth sits at the head.