The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  MAYFLOWER DESCENDANTS

  Throughout your life, you will probably meet many, many people who claim that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Many of them think this makes them “true” Americans—more American than you’ll ever be, anyway. Ignore them. It’s cool to know your family history and all, but you can’t really take credit for the good things your ancestors did unless you’re also willing to take the blame for the bad things they did.

  Plymouth Rock as it appeared back in the 1920s. It’s even less impressive-looking nowadays.

  The sailors on the Mayflower called the Pilgrims “glib-glabbety puke stockings.” Yes, the word “puke,” along with most of the swearwords people use today, had been in common use for centuries by then.

  Of course, the New World had long since been colonized by then, so why do some people think of them as the first Americans? After all, coming over for religious reasons isn’t really that much more “American” than coming over to get rich (less so, if we’re being totally honest). But while most earlier settlers came to get rich and ended up getting eaten, the Pilgrims came looking for freedom—and against all odds, they found it.

  The Pilgrims initially set forth for America on two ships, the famous Mayflower and another, smaller ship called the Speedwell. But the Speedwell soon sprang a leak, forcing them to turn back. It was later said that the leak had been sprung deliberately by the crew, who resorted to sabotage to avoid spending several weeks holed up on a ship with the boring ol’ Pilgrims. Eventually, they all piled onto the Mayflower and made the journey on a single ship.

  The first Thanksgiving: a veritable treasure trove of stupid hat jokes.

  The Mayflower had been built for cargo—it normally held wine, not people. And the Pilgrims were the sort who got seasick easily.

  Over the course of the trip, many fell ill with tuberculosis or scurvy (everyone’s favorite sea disease). They arrived in November after a two-month voyage and spent the next few months living aboard the ship, since they were in no way capable of building a shelter good enough to survive the winter on land. By the end of the winter, when they were ready to go ashore, just over half of the Pilgrims and about half of the crew had already died.

  THE PLYMOUTH COLONY

  There are some landmarks that just aren’t worth the trip, and one of these is Plymouth Rock, in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It sounds like a cool thing to see: the rock where the Mayflower came to rest, beginning one of the first successful settlements of the new world. But in reality, it’s just a rock. And it’s not very big or impressive. And the Pilgrims probably never actually landed on it; the story that they did came from a ninety-three-year-old guy in the 1740s, over a century after the landing. And he’d just heard it from his father, who had heard a rumor about it years before. In those days, the first rule of history was apparently to believe whatever old people said. Actually, it still pretty much is.

  The American soil was far, far better for farming than anything the Pilgrims had ever seen before, and there were more animals to kill and eat than they’d probably ever dreamed of. But they were afraid to eat anything they didn’t recognize, and lived mostly on the salted meat and biscuits they’d brought with them. By the end of their first winter, nearly half of them were dead, and most of the rest weren’t doing so well, either. At one point, only six or seven people were well enough to do any farming or hunting.

  It’s almost certain that they all would have died if they hadn’t met Tisquantum, a Native American who spoke English. He had been kidnapped and brought to England in 1605, then returned to America with John Smith in 1614 or 1615. He was promptly kidnapped by a guy who attempted to sell him into slavery, and he ended up in England again in 1618. He arrived back in America the next year, only to find that his entire village had been wiped out by a plague.

  PURITAN NAMES

  There was a brief craze among Puritans for giving their kids really long names, like The Lord Is My Shepherd I Shall Not Want Jones, or Fight the Good Fight of Faith Johnson. Just another reason to be glad you weren’t born until much later.

  Even more miraculous than the fact that he spoke English was the fact that he didn’t hold a grudge. Having been kidnapped and sold into slavery more than once, and having had his whole village wiped out by a disease that had surely been brought by Europeans, he could hardly have been blamed if he’d kept his distance from the Pilgrims. But instead, he taught them how to farm and quite simply saved their butts. He also negotiated a peace between the Pilgrims and the local tribes that lasted for fifty years.

  Tisquantum is more commonly known as Squanto. No one is sure why he’s usually called that today, but some believe that history books started calling him that in the 1870s because it was easier for kids to remember. Kids in the 1870s must have been pret-ty dumb.

  STUPID HATS OF HISTORY:

  THE CAPOTAIN

  The capotain (now called the Pilgrim hat) was like a top hat that just wasn’t trying very hard.

  THE FIRST THANKSGIVING

  When people talk about the first Thanksgiving, they usually say that the Pilgrims had a big feast to thank Tisquantum and the nearby tribes for helping them not to starve to death. But the first Thanksgiving was really just a traditional harvest feast. Both the English and the Native Americans traditionally held big celebrations around harvest time.

  The Pilgrims invited about ninety of the natives for a feast that went on for about three days. We’re not entirely sure what they ate, but it probably included geese, swans, deer, and ducks. Turkey and pumpkin were probably present. Green bean casserole and sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping were probably not.

  There were also some games played—obviously, they couldn’t just eat for three days straight without a break. One of the Pilgrims who was present wrote, “Among other recreations, we exercised our arms.” Did these guys know how to party or what?

  THE PURITANS: BORING GUYS WITH EXCITING SEX LIVES

  In England around this time, the Puritans, a group who wanted to radically reshape the government and the Church of England (rather than just setting up their own ultrareligious colony, like the “separatist” Pilgrims), came to power in England and began to send colonists over to the New World to reshape that, too.

  Today, when we call people Puritans, we usually mean that they’re boring prudes who don’t drink, smoke, have sex, or read books with wizards in them. In fact, though, the Puritans were very much into sex—they practiced a thing called bundling in which single male visitors to the house would be invited to spend the night in the same bed as any single girl of marrying age to see how they got on. In theory, the two were just supposed to cuddle, not have sex, and there was supposed to be a board between them. In practice, this wasn’t always the case. The Puritans actually don’t seem to have thought of premarital sex as a particularly big deal (though they were certainly against extramarital sex), but if the bundling led to a pregnancy (as it often did), the couple were married at once, whether they actually liked each other or not.

  “Exercised our arms” doesn’t mean they had arm-wrestling matches, it means they had target practice with their muskets. Shooting stuff is still a Thanksgiving tradition in Texas.

  THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

  After the Pilgrims, history books usually come to a long, long gap. Apparently, outside of Puritans impregnating other Puritans, nothing interesting happened from about 1620 up until the 1690s. That’s when Puritan colonists living in Salem, Massachusetts, decided to start accusing each other of witchcraft. Accusing people of witchcraft and then torturing them to death was nothing new—it had been going on in Europe since the Middle Ages—but this was the first major outbreak in America.

  INTERROGATING WITCHES

  One of the most famous methods of interrogating witches in Europe was dunking, or holding them underwater to see if they’d use their magic powers to escape. Puritans never used dunking in Salem. They did, however, apparently try to root out witches in Salem by making “witch c
ake.” This cake was made from rye and the pee of afflicted children and fed to a dog. The idea was that if the children were really bewitched, the dog would also act bewitched after eating the cake. Dogs were widely believed to be witches’ “familiars.” Once again, be glad you’re not a Puritan. Or a Puritan’s dog.

  The Puritans were terrified of the largely unexplored continent where they were living, and we think we can call them superstitious without offending too many people. Since most of the unexplored continent hadn’t been settled by Christians, like most of Europe had by then, they truly believed that they were living in the devil’s country and that the devil would surely fight back against their invasion of his turf. They tended to think devils, demons, and witches were lurking behind every tree in the forest. The writings of Cotton Mather, a Boston minister, assured them that this was the case.

  If you were raised by Puritans, you’d probably end up acting like this, too.

  The minister in Salem at the time was a fellow named Samuel Parris. He decided that in addition to getting his salary, he should also own the parsonage. Several locals got upset and decided to stop paying him.

  Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister, wrote very influential books that convinced people to be on the lookout for witches. He was brought into Salem to try to help the afflicted girls, and some blame the whole ugly affair on him and his ability to whip people into an antiwitch frenzy. Don’t read Harry Potter books in front of Cotton Mather.

  Shortly after that, his nine-year-old daughter and her eleven-year-old cousin began suffering from violent fits, during which they screamed, bit people, and threw things around the room. When the adults determined that the fits weren’t because of epilepsy, they jumped to the next logical conclusion: the girls had been possessed by the devil.

  Exactly what was really wrong with the girls will probably never be known. Some say they might have been hallucinating as a result of eating some sort of mold; others say they were suffering from a nerve disease now known as Huntington’s chorea. It’s also possible that they simply made the whole thing up to get attention.

  Giles Corey gets railroaded in court.

  But people back then believed that they had been possessed by the devil, who, they assumed, was working with Tituba, a slave in the Parris household whom the girls named as a witch. Their word was good enough for the locals to assume Tituba was guilty; after all, the girls were white, and Tituba wasn’t.

  When pressed to name other witches, the girls named Sarah Good, a poor woman who would curse under her breath at people if they didn’t give her free food, and Sarah Osborne, an old woman who, in addition to being downright annoying, had committed the sin of marrying her indentured servant. Neither Good nor Osborne attended church, which made them easy targets as witches.

  Soon, several others were accused of being witches, too. It’s important to note that none of these women were actually witches or even pagans—they were mostly just people who didn’t fit in. Some may have been lesbians, and some may have had Down syndrome or some misunderstood physical ailment. Others were just plain unpopular.

  And once people started accusing each other of witchcraft, things got ugly quickly. The town lapsed into witch-hunt mania, and soon, as many as two hundred people had been imprisoned. By the time the mania ended, twenty of them had been executed, and five more had died in jail.

  None of them were burned at the stake or thrown off a cliff, like some accused witches in Europe had been. The method of execution was hanging, except in the case of eighty-year-old Giles Corey, who was pressed: when he refused to enter a plea in court on the grounds that the whole witch hunt was ridiculous, the magistrates interrogated him by piling heavy stones on top of him—a method that, unbeknownst to them, had been illegal for twenty years. Even as the stones got heavier and heavier on top of him, he refused to enter a plea. His last words before he was finally crushed to death were said to be “more weight.” Truly, this man had stones.8

  The witch trials were apparently enough excitement to last people a long time. History books often don’t mention a thing between about 1692 and the 1770s. We’ll follow suit.

  SOME OF THE STUFF WE MISSED

  Since no historians can cram everything important into one book, we’ll try to briefly touch on some of the stuff we’ve skipped over at the end of every chapter, so you can go look ’em up for yourself.

  Some of the stuff we missed from the days of the Vikings up to 1770 or so:

  The French and Indian War: A war from 1754 to 1763, mainly involving the French, who were also setting up colonies, and the Iroquois confederacy, who sided with the French, against the British. The British won, but many American colonists were rather annoyed that their sons were killed to protect British interests. This was actually the fourth war between the British and the French and Indian groups in America, the previous three being King William’s War (1689 to 1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702 to 1713), and King George’s War (1744 to 1748). This was George II, not the guy colonists rebelled against later, for the record. That was George III.

  The Royal Proclamation of 1763: A proclamation that prohibited settlers from going west of the Appalachian Mountains. It was widely unpopular with colonists and was never enforced.

  Town crier: The guy often seen in colonial reenactments ringing a bell and shouting “Hear ye!” before reading the news. Really more of a European thing than an American thing; London still has one.

  Quilting bees: How people amused themselves in those days.

  Jonathan Edwards: A preacher who scared the crap out of people. His sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is one of fairly few “literary” works from this period that is still kinda famous. Not recommended for bedtime reading.

  William Penn: The founder of the Pennsylvania colony and an early champion of democracy and freedom. Your teacher might tell you he’s the guy on the Quaker Oats box, but the Quaker Oats company says this isn’t true (though the resemblance is striking).

  Anne Bradstreet: A Puritan poet who was really something of a free thinker (especially as Puritans go).

  END-OF-CHAPTER QUESTIONS

  MULTIPLE CHOICE

  1. Why don’t you ever see guys named Panfilo anymore?

  It sounds too much like some kind of fancy bread.

  Naming a kid Panfilo has been globally outlawed since 1987.

  My grandfather is named Panfilo! How dare you insult my heritage?

  Who cares? I’m naming my kid Bjarni.

  (ANSWER: LET’S GO WITH A, BUT WE CHALLENGE YOU, THE NEXT GENERATION, TO MAKE IT D.)

  2. Why did so many colonists die?

  They were quitters who did not give 110 percent.

  A meteor struck the area.

  They couldn’t get enough of the sweet, crunchity taste of their shipmates.

  Benjamin Franklin had not yet invented the Franklin Stove.

  None of the above.

  (ANSWER: D, OF COURSE.)

  3. What would you do if you found yourself transported back in time to Salem in the 1690s?

  Shake hands with Giles Corey.

  Use modern science to check people for Huntington’s chorea.

  Ask for some cake.

  Run like a nerd out of gym class.

  (ANSWER: D, IF YOU HAVE ANY SENSE, BUT YOU MIGHT WANT TO DO A FIRST, JUST FOR BRAGGING RIGHTS.)

  4. Are you going to eat that pickle?

  Yes.

  No.

  Hang on, I’ll see how hungry I am after I finish my burger.

  I just licked it, still want it?

  That’s no pickle, that’s my wife!

  (ANSWER: A. EAT YOUR PICKLES, KIDS. AND DRINK YOUR ORANGE JUICE, OR YOU’LL GET SCURVY!)

  ESSAY

  1. When all those manure shovelers left to explore new lands, what happened to the manure?

  2. What do you think happened to those Croatoan guys—and what gave you that idea?

  3. Didn’t anything besides the witch trials happen between about 1692
and 1770? Can your teacher name one major event from that era in American history? Were people so busy keeping from starving and holding quilting bees that they didn’t have time to do anything noteworthy?

  RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT

  Find out what a quilting bee is—and what in the world is fun about it, if anything.

  WORD SEARCH! TO HELP YOU LEARN …

  See if you can find the words “Viking,” “Bjarni,” “Raleigh,” “Panfilo,” “Croatoan,” and “Native American” in the following block of random text:

  YOUDOREALIZEOFCOURSETHATWORDFINDS

  DON’TACTUALLYHELPYOULEARNANYTHING

  ABOUTVIKINGSORBJARNIHERJOLFFSENOR

  SIRWALTERRALEIGHTHEYAREINFACTJUST

  POINTLESSBUSYWORKTOKEEPKIDSQUIET

  SOTHETEACHERCANHAVEFIVEMINUTESTO

  GRADEYOURESSAYSABOUTWHATHAPPENED

  TOTHECROATOANGUYSORWHATSPICESMIGHT

  HAVEMADEPANFILOTASTIERTOCANNIBALS

  BUTWEWILLTAKETHISMOMENTTOPOINTOUT

  THATNOTALLNATIVEAMERICANSWERE

  CANNIBALSANDTHATNONEOFTHEMHAVEBEEN

  FORSEVERALCENTURIESNOWOFCOURSE

  2 An isthmus is a small piece of land connecting two big ones. The Central American one is formed of the countries Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama. An easy way to remember this is B.H.G.E.S.C.R.N.P.—Big Honkin’ Gorillas Eat Sexy Canadian Realtors, Not Pickles.