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festival , forget about it being a family holiday . Put away your Norman Rockwell paintings . Turn off Bing Crosby . Thanksgiving was a multicultural community event . If it had been about family , the Pilgrims never would have invited the Indians to join them .
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MYTH # 4 The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock According to historian George Willison , who devoted his life to the subject , the story about the rock is all malarkey , a public relations stunt pulled off by townsfolk to attract attention . What Willison found out is that the Plymouth Rock legend rests entirely on the dubious testimony of Thomas Faunce , a ninetyfive year old man , who told the story more than a century after the Mayflower landed . Unfortunately , not too many people ever heard how we came by the story of Plymouth Rock . Willison ' s book came out at the end of World War II and Americans had more on their minds than Pilgrims then . So we ' ve all just gone merrily along repeating the same old story as if it ' s true when it ' s not . And anyway , the Pilgrims didn ' t land in Plymouth first . They first made landfall at Provincetown . Of course , the people of Plymouth stick by hoary tradition . Tour guides insist that Plymouth Rock is THE rock .
MYTH # 5 Pilgrims Lived in Log Cabins No Pilgrim ever lived in a log cabin . The log cabin did not appear in America until late in the seventeenth century , when it was introduced by Germans and Swedes . The very term " log cabin " cannot be found in print until the 1770s . Log cabins were virtually unknown in England at the time the Pilgrims arrived in America . So what kind of dwellings did the Pilgrims inhabit ? As you can see if you visit Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts , the Pilgrims lived in wood clapboard houses made from sawed lumber .
MYTH # 6 Pilgrims , Puritans -- Same Thing Though even presidents get this wrong -- Ronald Reagan once referred to Puritan John Winthrop as a Pilgrim -- Pilgrims and Puritans were two different groups . The Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower and lived in Plymouth . The Puritans , arriving a decade later , settled in Boston . The Pilgrims welcomed heterogeneousness . Some ( so-called " strangers ") came to America in search of riches , others ( socalled " saints ") came for religious reasons . The Puritans , in contrast , came over to America strictly in search of religious freedom . Or , to be technically correct , they came over in order to be able to practice their religion freely . They did not welcome dissent . That we confuse Pilgrims and Puritans would have horrified both . Puritans considered the Pilgrims incurable utopians . While both shared the belief that the Church of England had become corrupt , only the Pilgrims believed it was beyond redemption . They therefore chose the path of Separatism . Puritans held out the hope the church would reform .
MYTH # 7 Puritans Hated Sex Actually , they welcomed marital sex as a God-given responsibility . When one member of the First Church of Boston refused to have conjugal relations with his wife two years running , he was expelled . Cotton Mather , the celebrated Puritan minister , condemned a married couple who had abstained from sex in order to achieve a higher spirituality . They were the victims , he wrote , of a " blind zeal ."
by Rick Shenkman , www . historynewsnews . com