Thanksgiving History of Migration to the New World

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm here today to tell you all about the history of Thanksgiving. The sixteenth and seventeenth century were an exciting time in Europe because of the discovery and exploration of the New World. First, the New World was not really new, people had been living there for thousands of years already, but it was new to the Europeans. At least on a large scale, every one knowing about it, this other continent out there, and this encouraged a lot of settlement and migration. One of these groups of people that were interested in migrating were the Puritans or the Separatist Protestants as they also referred to themselves as. They were pretty fervent in regards to their religion and they were not as free to celebrate that religion in their native England. This led this group to be roaming around the continent. They settled in the Netherlands for a while, that didn't quite work out in regards to how the Dutch lived. And then after that they basically hopped on the boats, the Mayflower, and went on their way to the New World. They hoped, actually, to settle further south in America, looking like around the Virginia colony and the like but because of lots of in climate weather, just blew their ships north and they weren't able to get back down south. The storms and the waters were treacherous and they ended up landing at Plymouth Rock which in current day Massachusetts. And there they basically stayed and this is actually the first big step towards what would eventually become Thanksgiving in North America with this group of people."