Misguided leftists can learn a lot from American history. They can learn a lot, specifically, from the lessons provided us by the Pilgrims clinging to life on the Massachusetts coast in 1623 and by the wide-eyed British invaders who set foot on the New World in 1776.
Just ask Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough, two of the nation’s most popular contemporary historians.
I couldn’t help but notice very illuminating (and perhaps unintended) odes to traditional conservative values in recent works by each author about pivotal moments in American history.
The first illuminating passage came in Philbrick’s spectacular book, “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War.”
He does an incredible job of taking the pop-culture caricature of the Pilgrims and bringing their real story to life – real humans with real struggles and hopes and dreams.
You know the basic story of the early days of the Plymouth Colony. The settlers had trouble feeding themselves in the first few years, to the point that starvation was a very real problem. But they quickly found a solution.
Here are Philbrick’s words:
“The fall of 1623 marked the end of Plymouth’s debilitating food shortages. For the last two planting seasons, the Pilgrims had grown crops communally … but as the disastrous harvest of the previous fall had shown, something drastic needed to be done to increase the annual yield.”
So here’s what happened:
