Welcome to the history tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hello, surprise. I bet you didn't expect to hear from us this soon. Well, it is National American Indian Heritage Month, and it is also this week, Thanksgiving in the United States. So as is our

tradition, we are offering you this bonus episode. We post Pocahontas's story every year just to get it

out there that perhaps the romantic comedy meet cute bandied about this time of year is not the entire

story. We wish you joy. We wish you peace and moist

turkey and hope that the worst arguments you have today are stuffing versus dressing,

mac and cheese versus green bean casserole, and the classic and perhaps the most virulent argument

of all, jelly and cranberry sauce versus whole bean homemade.

On with the show.

A quick note due to a cascading series of technical difficulties, Susan has disappeared from the first section.

We will rejoin her again in section two.

But for the beginning, it is only me.

And here's your 30 second summary.

Once there was a story about an 11-year-old girl who saved the life of an explorer from her father's wrath.

She did save the lives of his people, but not the way you've been told. The end.

Let's talk about Pocahontas, but first let's drop her into history.

In 1607, Galileo invented an early version of the thermometer called the thermoscope,

and he was deep into his studies of motion.

Shakespeare's new plays, King Lear, and Macbeth, were both being performed, except during the months between July and November when the plague closed all the theaters.

China was in the Ming Dynasty. Philip III was King of Spain and Portugal. Vasili the 4th was czar of Russia.

Queen Elizabeth I had died four years earlier, but her nephew, King James I, was still trying to fill her shoes. Former subjects, Queen and Zinga and Artemisia Gentileski,

were both young women. And in 1607, three British ships, full of men, arrived to establish

...