CHAPTER 3: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FIRST

THANKSGIVING

1 Michael Dorris, “Why I’m Not Thankful for Thanksgiving” (New York:
Council on Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 9, no. 7, 1978): 7.

2 Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the
Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 15.

3 Howard Simpson, Invisible Armies: The Impact of Disease on American
History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), 2.

4 Col. Thomas Aspinwall, quoted in Jennings, The Invasion of America, 175.

5 Kathleen Teltsch, “Scholars and Descendants Uncover Hidden Legacy of
Jews in Southwest,” New York Times, 11/11/1990, A30; “Hidden Jews of the
Southwest,” Groundrock (Spring 1992).

6 Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural
Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972), 83. Our cowboy
culture’s Spanish origin explains why it is so similar to the gaucho tradition of
Argentina.

7 The new Pageant has also increased its treatment of Spanish rule.

8 James Axtell, “Europeans, Indians, and the Age of Discovery in American
History Textbooks,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 630.

9 The passage is basically accurate, although the winter of 1620-21 was not
particularly harsh and probably did not surprise the British, and Indians did not
assist them until spring.

10 William Langer, “The Black Death,” Scientific American, February 1964.

11 Ibid.; see also William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1976), 166-85.

12 William H. McNeill, “Disease in History,” lecture at the University of
Vermont, 10/18/1988. I use microbe and later germ in their larger meaning,
including viral as well as bacterial pathogens.

13 Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, 34. Although people do get pneumonia