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Subject: Excerpt Of History
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 17:49:37 EDT
"The belief that the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock rests solely on
dubious secondhand testimony given by a ninety-five year old man more than a
century after the Mayflower arrived. The statement was made in 1741 by Elder Thomas
Faunce, who based his claims on a story he had supposedly been told as a boy
by his father, who himself arrived in America three years after the Mayflower.
At any rate, the Pilgrims didn't land first at Plymouth. They landed at
Provincetown. To the considerable dismay of the residents of Provincetown,
however, nobody remembers that.
Plymouth was not the first English settlement in North America, or even the
first permanent settlement. Jamestown, planted in 1607, was first. The
Pilgrims have won the reputation that they were the first only because New England
historians made such a fuss about them. And until the nineteenth century
American history was largely written, by, and for New Englanders."
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