This week, a class on how Pilgrims became part of the United States's founding story in 19th century history textbooks.

Professor Abram Van Egan of Washington University describes why early historians and educators emphasized the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony over earlier earlier settlements such as Jamestown in Virginia.

So insofar as Jamestown appears on any map in her history, it appears as associated with slavery,

right? Which is why it's not, she doesn't want it to be a turning point in American history.

Because if it's the turning point in American history, you can't not talk about

slavery. More after this. The goal today is to think about how the pilgrims and the Puritans,

who we've been talking about all course long, became such a national part of our heritage,

such a huge part of our history.

What happened?

How do we get from the fact of their coming to these annual remembrances like at Thanksgiving

and to the important place of them in political speeches?

Reagan's calling us a city on a hill because a Puritan called us a city on a hill,

because the pilgrims came here and so forth. How do we get from one place to the next? And the way

we get there is through the work of history. So what we're going to be looking at today is after

the United States becomes an independent nation, what happens to the development

of historical writing? That is, how does historical writing take off? How does it focus on

certain national narratives? Where do they develop? And what happens to maintain them and really

to disseminate them to a wide population? We talked last time, we talked before, about Ernest Renan,

about collective memory, about this idea that nations have a kind of what's called temporal depth,

right? This idea that part of what makes a nation a nation is the idea of shared memories. And part

of those shared memories is forgetting other memories,

forgetting other aspects of history in order to cohere around a kind of story. So we talked

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