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Ben Franklin's World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

Hello and welcome to Ben Franklin's World Freevisited, a series of classic episodes that bring

fresh perspective to our latest episodes and had deeper connections to our understanding of

early American history. And I'm your host, Liz Cobart. This week is Thanksgiving week in the

United States. On Thursday, most of us will sit down with friends, family, and other loved ones and share a

large meal where we will give thanks for whatever we're grateful for over the last year.

Now, in elementary school, we're taught to associate this holiday and its rituals with the religious

separatists or pilgrims who migrated from England to what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts.

We are taught that at the end of the fall harvest, the separatists sat down with their

indigenous neighbors to share in the bounty that the Wampanog people help them grow by

teaching the separatists how to sow and cultivate crops like corn in the coastal soils of New

England. In our last revisited episode, episode 290, we learned about the

Wampanog and Narragansett peoples before the colonists' arrival in December 1620. In this revisited

episode, episode 291, we will investigate the arrival of the Mayflower in the indigenous world that

the separatists arrived in. We'll also explore how the

Wampanog and Narragansett peoples interacted with their new European neighbors and how they

contended with the English people who were determined to settle on their lands. With that,

let's reenter the world of the Wampanog, a people who still proudly live in present-day Massachusetts

in Rhode Island. I also wish you and your family a very happy Thanksgiving.

In late fall 1620, the Wampanog village of Patuxet stood nearly empty.

Developed over thousands of years, this established and thriving community was recently devastated

...