SETTLING NORTH AMERICA 1497 1732
THE MAYFLOWER SETTLEMENT
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Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
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“The feast was a secular celebration, so it never would have been considered a thanksgiving in the pilgrims’ minds.”
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“The story of the Pilgrims and their harvest feast has since become one of best-known in American history, but you may not know it as well as you think.”
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“Gradually the custom prevailed in New England of annually celebrating thanksgiving after the harvest.”
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“Plymouth, the colony established there by the Pilgrims in 1621, became the first permanent European settlement in New England.”
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Detailed explanation-1: -’Pilgrim’ became (by the early 1800s at least) the popular term applied to all the Mayflower passengers-and even to other people arriving in Plymouth in those early years-so that the English people who settled Plymouth in the 1620s are generally called the Pilgrims.
Detailed explanation-2: -Then as now, a pilgrim denoted someone who traveled to a shrine or holy place as a devotee (or, as some sources have noted, as penance). The Plymouth Pilgrims came to the New World because they were fleeing religious persecution-not journeying to a holy place but from an unacceptable situation.
Detailed explanation-3: -While it’s popularly thought that the Pilgrims fled England in search of religious freedom, the separatists’ quest had ended more than a decade before they boarded the Mayflower.
Detailed explanation-4: -The pilgrims came to America in search of religious freedom. At the time, England required its citizens to belong to the Church of England. People wanted to practice their religious beliefs freely, and so many fled to the Netherlands, where laws were more flexible.