Scholars team up to dispel 400-year-old fake news about U.S.

[csziggy]

Scholars team up to dispel 400-year-old ‘fake news’ about U.S.

By WILLIAM J. KOLE
AP, December 25, 2016

BOSTON (AP) — Fake news, quadricentennial edition: America’s early settlers were all pious. The native people were savages. Freedom and liberty were available to all from Day One.

As the U.S. gears up to mark the 400th anniversary of its roots as a nation, leading scholars from around the globe are teaming up to dispel myths and challenge long-held assumptions about how the country was settled.

Their group, New England Beginnings, is using phone apps and searchable online archives to help set the record straight about the early 1600s — and fill in some important knowledge gaps.

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A key focus, Bremer said, is presenting a much more complete and accurate picture of how the early settlers interacted with Native Americans.

Underscoring the gulf between how natives and white Americans see history, on every Thanksgiving since 1970, members of New England tribes have gathered in downtown Plymouth for a solemn National Day of Mourning observance that recalls the disease, racism and oppression the settlers brought.

More: http://www.boston.com/news/history/2016/12/25/scholars-team-up-to-dispel-400-year-old-fake-news-about-u-s

[Warpy]

1. They did that at Plimoth Plantation 40 years ago

and we learned that in history classes even before then, that there were three reasons to come to the New World: Gold, Glory and God.

While the Pilgrims wanted to establish their oddly punitive heaven on earth, more than half the passengers on the Mayflower were either businessmen looking for a way to make a fortune and indentured servants, who wanted to serve out their terms so they could then make a fortune.

[lunatica]

2. You must be old like me

Because history has been dumbed down so Dubya could understand it. They don't teach what they used to teach us.

[Warpy]

3. Mostly so they wouldn't offend any Evangelicals

by inserting any human reality into the Grand and Glorious Conquest of the Americas and Conversion of the Heathens.

I gave my friends' kids copies of "Lies My Teacher Tole Me."

[csziggy]

4. This program could be an outgrowth of that older effort

I know I was taught all the usual myths about the glorious Pilgrims and the Plymouth colony. But when I got into genealogy I found out that there were effectively three classes of settlers - the monied class that was allowed to buy shares in the colony corporation and become Freemen, the people with skills who had scraped together enough money to pay their passages but not enough to buy into the corporation, and the indentured servants who worked to pay for their passage and maybe to earn enough to get some land.

My ancestors were members of all three classes and some, such as Anne Hutchinson, were troublemakers who were thrown out for not adhering to the tenets that the Pilgrims required everyone to believe. From the lives of their descendants, it looks as though those with skills that were passed along to their children were most successful.

[malaise]

5. Very interesting

K & R