Plymouth
A colony that became a national origin myth
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The Puritans were English Protestants who held that the Church of England was insufficiently reformed, and some of them chose to leave the country. The Mayflower Compact is genuinely interesting as an early instance of government by the expressed consent of the governed. The myth around it is a later construction: Thanksgiving became a national holiday only in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, when a unifying northern origin story had political value. The colony survived its first winter largely because of Tisquantum, who spoke English because he had been abducted to Europe and sold as a slave.
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A group of English Puritans crossed the Atlantic and settled in Massachusetts. They were not the first Europeans in North America, nor the largest group — but the story about them was later made into the origin story of the United States.
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