#85 The Pilgrims Confront the Enemies Within
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2022
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It is the fall of 1621. After the show of force at Nemasket, the cementing of relations with Massasoit, and the three day feast we now regard as “the first Thanksgiving,” the Pilgrims confront enemies within. The Pilgrims did not yet know it, but for the next year and a half they would battle perfidy, betrayal, and enemies within who would threaten them existentially. The perfidy would come from Thomas Weston, the same investor who changed the terms of their deal at the last minute back in London, forcing them to sell critical supplies in order to make up for Weston’s unfulfilled promises, and a new batch of settlers who would shortly arrive in Plymouth at Weston’s behest. The betrayal would come, sad to say, from Tisquantum, who would play both sides against the middle and disrupt the alliance with Massasoit just when it was most important.
Before we do any of that, though, I talk about the topic of presentism, which became a social media kerfuffle in the last week or two following an opinion piece by Professor James Sweet, the current president of the American Historical Association, and his rapid apology after a backlash.
[Addendum added 12/4/2022: For a well-written and balanced recap of the Sweet controversy, including thoughts on why he provoked such a strong reaction among “very online” historians, you might read “What AHA President James Sweet Got Wrong—And Right“.]
Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2
Facebook: The History of the Americans Podcast
Selected references for this episode
James H. Sweet, “Is History History?” and appended apology.
Lynn Hunt, “Against Presentism.”
[Commission earned on sales through the following links]
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War
John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty
Nick Bunker, Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History
William Bradford and Edward Winslow (presumed), Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth
Edward Winslow, Good News From New England
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 85. I'm your host, Jack Heneman. |
| 0:13.2 | And I'm recording this on August 27th, 2022 in Austin, Texas, where the heat is broken and the rains have come. If you are new to the podcast, |
| 0:24.0 | we are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning |
| 0:29.7 | without presentism. So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you have heard me say |
| 0:37.2 | that last sentence many times. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you have heard me say that last sentence many times. |
| 0:40.3 | And if you've not heard the two or three episodes in which I talk about presentism, you might not be entirely clear about its meaning. |
| 0:48.5 | Well, an online kerfuffle in the last week confirms that many academic historians are not entirely clear either. |
| 0:58.2 | I try not to do current events in this podcast because it's in the nature of history podcasts that |
| 1:03.2 | people listen to episodes years after they are made. But this controversy is a bit timeless. |
| 1:09.6 | So I'm going to touch on it before we get to all the betrayal and perfidy in this week's episode. |
| 1:16.2 | For purposes of this podcast, my definition of presentism is the first to pop up on the Googles. |
| 1:23.0 | Quote, the uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past |
| 1:30.3 | events in terms of modern values and concepts. A related but subtly different word is anachronism, |
| 1:39.1 | which is the attribution of a custom event or object to a period to which it does not belong. It would be, |
| 1:48.0 | for example, anachronistic to say that Philip II was evil for not defending religious freedom, |
| 1:53.9 | or that Elizabeth I was committing war crimes by issuing letters of Mark to Sir Francis Drake. Boom. A lot of what I would call |
| 2:04.6 | presentism is also anachronism, but not all if that's useful. Anyway, I like the word presentism, |
| 2:11.4 | because it's easy for people like me who are not professional historians to understand. I discussed my objections to |
| 2:20.7 | presentism in the back half of the revised introduction episode, which I dropped about four months ago |
| 2:26.8 | in early April 2022. Among them, most important is that presentism interferes with understanding, quoting me. |
| 2:37.9 | On this podcast, you don't hear throat-clearing disclaimers, such as, of course, it was evil to burn down those indigenous villages. |
| 2:48.2 | It's not that I don't think it was evil. |
... |
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