Happy Thanksgiving! For many people in the United States, today is a day of food, family, and footba

Happy Thanksgiving! For many people in the United States, today is a day of food, family, and football. The holiday, however, is rooted in traditions that go back to sixteenth-century Europe. In the U.S., the “first Thanksgiving” is commonly acknowledged to be a November 1621 feast which brought together the pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, in what is now Massachusetts, with members of the Wampanoag, who provided crucial help to the settlers as they adapted to their new environment. Seven months earlier, the two groups had established a treaty which lasted for fifty years, and which is one of the few instances of cooperation between European colonists and Native Americans. Robert Walter Weir depicted some of the pilgrims in this 1857 painting, a reduced version of an earlier mural for the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. The group of English Puritans shown here had spent ten years of asylum in the Netherlands and were about to depart on the Speedwell to join the Mayflower in its voyage to the Americas. After several false starts, they had to abandon their ship and board the Mayflower, which arrived in New England the winter of 1620. Weir based the painting on documentary evidence—written accounts, histories, and costume records—to enhance its authenticity. Most of the figures were identified in a key. They included Elder William Brewster, with the New Testament open in his lap; Governor John Carver, with hat in hand; and William Bradford, just visible between these two men. Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony in 1621, organized that “first Thanksgiving.”Posted by Connie H. Choi -- source link

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