400 years ago - The first Thanksgiving
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-four-hundredth-anniversary-of-thanksgiving/
1620 is truly another world. The Pilgrims were not medieval, but they were closer in time and outlook to the High Middle Ages than to our own day. The voyage of the Mayflower was closer to the end of the Crusades than it was to the Eisenhower administration. The Black Plague still returned in waves in Europe. More time elapsed between the first Thanksgiving and the birth of George Washington than elapsed between the death of James Madison and the birth of Joe Biden.
In 1620, Shakespeare had been dead for only four years. Still in the future were Galileo’s 1632 confrontation with the Inquisition and Hobbes’s 1652 publication of Leviathan. Rembrandt was 14 years old; Milton was twelve. Descartes was just beginning to write. Newton, Locke, Montesquieu, Swift, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Louis XIV, and Peter the Great had not been born yet, much less Adam Smith, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mozart, or Burke. English-language novels were unknown: Pilgrim’s Progress would not be written for another half a century, Robinson Crusoe, for another century.
In 1620, much of the warfare in the Mediterranean was still powered by slave-rowed galleys. England shared a common king with Scotland, but the two were still separate realms; Britain would not be a united kingdom for another eight decades. Russia was still a distant backwater whose explorers had yet to reach the Pacific coast of Siberia. Prussia was just one of hundreds of obscure German states, ruled by an elector; the father of its first king was born in 1620. The Ming Dynasty still reigned in China. The Taj Mahal had not yet been built.
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Thanks for posting that. Good perspective.
Although on the other side of the ledger, Notre Dame had been standing for ~450 years.
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And slaves were already in the land. Did they have a turkey dinner? No! Systemic Racism!
