Fake news, quadricentennial edition: America\u2019s early settlers were all pious. The native people were savages. Freedom and liberty were available to all from Day One.<\/p>\n
As the US 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.<\/p>\n
Their group, New England Beginnings, is using phone apps and searchable online archives to help set the record straight about the early 1600s \u2014 and fill in some important knowledge gaps.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll many people know is that the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620, Boston was started in 1630, and then in 1776 we had a revolution,\u201d said Rose Doherty, president of the Partnership of Historic Bostons, a group devoted to the 17th-century history of the city and the much-older Boston in Lincolnshire on the east coast of England.<\/p>\n
Doherty\u2019s organization is among 19 prominent groups that comprise New England Beginnings. Others include the American Antiquarian Society, the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, Rhode Island\u2019s Tomaquag Museum, Britain\u2019s History of Independence Project and the Leiden American Pilgrim Museum in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
Together, they see an opening as the US prepares in 2020 to mark the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims\u2019 arrival in 1620.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of attention being paid right now to how you distinguish between real news and fake news. But this is something historians grapple with all the time,\u201d said Francis Bremer, a professor emeritus of history at Pennsylvania\u2019s Millersville University and the coordinator of New England Beginnings.<\/p>\n
A key focus, Bremer said, is presenting a much more complete and accurate picture of how the early settlers interacted with Native Americans.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an important part of the story that\u2019s really taken a back seat for a long time. You just can\u2019t bury history,\u201d said Paula Peters, a writer and activist and a member of Massachusetts\u2019 Wampanoag tribe. \u201cPeople don\u2019t know how quickly it became repressive for the Wampanoags. Ship after ship after ship arrived, and they came with laws and deeds. You really have to put yourself in the moccasins of the people who were enduring that.\u201d<\/p>\n
New England Beginnings is turning to technology to remedy such misapprehensions \u2014 and highlight the crucial role the 1600s played in shaping what would become the US.<\/p>\n
One member, the Boston-based Congregational Library and Archives, has launched a new app \u2014 \u201cPuritan Boston Tests Democracy\u201d \u2014 that sheds light on colonial hypocrisy. (Example: The settlers\u2019 first legal guarantee of individual liberty adopted in 1641 also condoned slavery).<\/p>\n
Another member, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, is preparing an online edition of Plymouth Gov. William Bradford\u2019s history, \u201cOf Plymouth Plantation,\u201d with notes reflecting Native American perspectives. A third, the Massachusetts Historical Society, soon will release a searchable online version of \u201cThe Winthrop Papers,\u201d a trove of material on early New England.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a very human record in church documents of people getting in fights, abandonment, sexual abuse,\u201d said Peggy Bendroth, director of the Congregational Library and Archives.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were very complicated people full of paradoxes and subtleties,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was just as much of a struggle for them as for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Picture source: Alamy Images<\/p>\n
AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fake news, quadricentennial edition: America\u2019s early settlers were all pious. The native people were savages. Freedom and liberty were available to all from Day One.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2081,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[33,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kt10.khaleejtimes.ae\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}