Here at Words on Books Central we only review books we like. We are in awe of Mayflower, A Story of Courage, Community and War by Nathaniel Philbrick.

I will add my plaudits to the rest, and admit I was stunned by the many things I hadn't known I didn't know about American history.

"In the American popular imagination," Philbrick writes, "the nation's history began with the Pilgrims, and then leapfrogged more than 150 years to Lexington and Concord and the Revolution."

I studied the Pilgrims in college, but that only made me suspect there was more to the story than a quest for religious freedom. I hadn't considered the social aftermath of the founding of Plymouth -- the aftermath being 55 years of uninterrupted peace and prosperity for Pilgrim and Indian alike.

I didn't know that. And I hadn't heard much about King Philip's War, a terrible area-wide settler vs. Indian conflagration that blew apart the existing native nations of New England, destroyed everyone's economy and plunged the colonies backward into hardship for another hundred years.

A war I hadn't heard of was a crucial turning point for our incipient civilization.

When the Pilgrims landed on what is now Cape Cod, and found a shallow harbor at Plymouth, they certainly would have failed if they had been alone. "But as (the Pilgrims of Plymouth) quickly discovered during that first terrifying fall and winter," Philbrick writes, "New England was far from uninhabited. There were still plenty of Native people, and to ignore or anger them was to risk annihilation."

"By forcing the English to improvise, the Indians prevented Plymouth Colony from ossifying into a monolithic cult of religious extremism."

"... For their part, the Indians were profoundly influenced by the English, and quickly created a new and dynamic culture full of Native and Western influences... the first fifty years... stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning."

That white settlers might experience fear and learn hatred when their houses were burned, families killed, crops destroyed and animals stolen is a story many know. But it's not as simple as that. There were many opportunities to make allies and avoid all-out war, and the governments of the colonies discarded those chances.

Offspring of the original Pilgrims craved Indian land, and looked for excuses to acquire it. At the same time new animals, plants, insects and disease, not to mention technologies such as guns, steel plows, fishing boats, fences and permanent dwellings, quickly transformed the land and sea into something much less hospitable to those who previously had lived off it.

Stunningly, slavery in America began at this time. Starving, dispirited, defeated Indians could not safely be set free, the victors believed, nor could they be fed and housed. They could however be sold for profit to ships bound for the West Indies.

The author's quotes I've used come mostly from his concluding chapter, "Conscience," where he succinctly sums up a book's worth of history and insight. Philbrick is one of the most effective prose historians writing today. His deep research becomes a most compelling story, one most of us are still learning.

Thanksgiving is only three months away. You might want to read Mayflower before the next celebration.

Aired Sunday September 9, 2007 at 10:55 am and Wednesday September 12, 2007 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

Mayflower, A Story of Courage, Community and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. Penguin Books paperback $16. ISBN 9780143111979. (Named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the NY Times Book Review.)

Philbrick won the National Book Award for his earlier work of history In the Heart of the Sea, Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex Penguin Books paperback $15. ISBN 0141001828.

In this short review I run the risk of oversimplifying everything. The original "Thanksgiving" was nothing like the quasi-historical celebration made national by Abraham Lincoln. It was more of a harvest festival, and there were no "helpful" Indians standing around while the Pilgrims feasted at a long table covered in linen. "Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration when Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement and soon provided five freshly killed deer... most of the celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires..." The Pilgrims also gathered fowl and probably fish for the feast.

The term King Philip's War refers to "Philip, son of Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader who greeted the Pilgrims in 1621."

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