The University of North Carolina Press

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October/December 1998


On Pilgrims and Thanksgiving

As we settle into the crisp, autumn season, Thanksgiving approaches, and our thoughts and plans turn to family, food, and festivities. But with all the hustle and bustle of the holiday season, the last thing to enter our minds may be the historical basis of all our feasting. John Seelye delves deeper than the hard, historical facts of Thanksgiving and illustrates the impact on our nation's psyche of our country's celebrations surrounding the Pilgrims and their arrival at Plymouth Rock. This excerpt, from the first chapter of Seelye's new book Memory's Nation, will get us all prepared for the approach of the holidays.

Excerpt from Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock by John Seelye. Copyright (c) 1998 The University of North Carolina Press. Reproduction or distribution is prohibited without the express permission of the University of North Carolina Press. All rights Reserved.


A Boat, a Ship, Some People
by John Seelye

The popular images we have of the Pilgrims, whether gathered in tearful prayer as they prepare to depart from Leyden or in thoughtful congress as each in turn signs the Mayflower Compact, or posed on the threshold provided by Plymouth Rock, or making their solitary way to Sabbath service through snowy woods, or seated with Massasoit and other Indians at the Thanksgiving table, all of these promote a powerful image of pure, selfless integrity that is without equal in the icons of American experience. . . . For those who would later celebrate them, the Pilgrims are sanctity itself. . . . These are not people portrayed in motion: they have been frozen, rather, at a key point in their passage, the moment they landed on the Rock. Behind them lies the Mayflower - their ark of passage from the Old World - before them is a vastness they will define by their presence. The moment is liminal, the Rock a literal threshold, but the execution conveys permanence, stability, structure. The perspective, as in virtually all depictions of the Landing, is from the shore the Pilgrims are contemplating and opens outward to the ocean. We never see what the Pilgrims are looking at; we are what they are looking at; we are the realized future. They are frozen in beholding us.

Memory's Nation is available at bookstores for $39.95 (hardcover), or from the University of North Carolina Press. 1-800-848-6224. Say you saw it on the internet.

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