The Pilgrim Fathers

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Pilgrim Fathers and their 1620 voyage to the New World on the Mayflower. Every year on the fourth Thursday in November, Americans go home to their families and sit down to a meal. It’s called Thanksgiving and it echoes a meal that took place nearly 400 years ago, when a group of religious exiles from Lincolnshire sat down, after a brutal winter, to celebrate their first harvest in the New World. They celebrated it in company with the American Indians who had helped them to survive.These settlers are called the Pilgrim Fathers. They were not the first and certainly not the largest of the early settlements but their Plymouth colony has retained a hold on the American imagination which the larger, older, violent and money-driven settlement of Jamestown has not.

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Guests

• Kathleen Burk 11 episodes
  Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London
• Harry Bennett No other episodes
  Reader in History and Head of Humanities at the University of Plymouth
• Tim Lockley 4 episodes
  Associate Professor of History at the University of Warwick

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Programme ID: b007rlb6

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007rlb6

Auto-category: 973.2 (United States history—Colonial period, 1607–1775)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, every year on the fourth Thursday in November Americans go home to their families and sit down to a meal called Thanksgiving.