HISTORY: The First Thanksgiving Was Nothing Like What You Were Taught.

Among the most compelling historical accounts of that world comes from Charles Mann’s intriguing 2005 book, “1491,” a revisionist history of the pre-Columbian Americas that renders our storybook conception of the first Thanksgiving obsolete and, by comparison, rather boring. The truth is, the Pilgrims were able to survive and establish their colony because they were drawn into the political machinations of Massasoit, a shrewd and calculating Indian leader who was trying to figure out how to save his people from apocalypse.

The Indians Drew The Pilgrims Into a Political Alliance
Massasoit was the sachem, or political and military leader, of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose combination of villages in southeastern Massachusetts. About five years before the Pilgrims arrived, Massasoit’s people had been decimated by diseases brought by earlier European traders. Entire villages had been depopulated—including a Patuxet village that the newly arrived Pilgrims settled into and named New Plymouth.

As Mann explains, Massasoit was in a bind. The epidemic that had hit the Wampanoag hadn’t touched their longtime enemies to the west, the Narragansett. Massasoit feared his weakened people would be overrun, so he decided to gamble and let the Pilgrims stay. European traders had been visiting New England for at least a century, but Indian leaders always forbid them from establishing permanent settlements. The relationship was strictly transactional. Far from seeing the Europeans as superior, writes Mann, the Indians had good reason to take advantage of these strange newcomers.

Fascinating stuff — read the whole thing.