Two for Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving, somewhat disparate items. They represent the ways I feel torn about this holiday.

First, Charles Mann's 2015 article from Smithsonian magazine on the native peoples of coastal North America in 1620. It includes reference to what most of us were taught, and a lot more on what we weren't. 

The truth of what set up the Wampanoag to work with the Pilgrims is not so much guns and steel as germs, he writes:

Based on accounts of the symptoms, the epidemic was probably of viral hepatitis, likely spread by contaminated food, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, of the Medical College of Virginia. The Indians “died in heapes as they lay in their houses,” the merchant Thomas Morton observed. In their panic, the recently infected fled from the dying, unknowingly carrying the disease with them to neighboring communities. Behind them the dead were “left for crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon.” Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed up to 90 percent of the people in coastal New England.

And from Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut historian and President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic,

Happy Thanksgiving! Lincoln made it a national holiday to mark the saving of the republic from the Slave Power. Today the republic is in danger from the Trump regime. Let us continue to fight for the composite nation.