Thanksgiving Time Resources at SUNY Broome

Edited by Amitai Etzioni, one of the most influential social and political thinkers of our time, this collection provides a compelling overview of the impact that holidays and rituals have on our family and communal life. From community solidarity to ethnic relations to religious traditions, We Are What We Celebrate argues that holidays such as Halloween, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, New Year's Eve, and Valentine's Day play an important role in reinforcing, and sometimes redefining, our values as a society. The collection brings together classic and original essays that, for the first time, offer a comprehensive overview and analysis of the important role such celebrations play in maintaining a moral order as well as in cementing family bonds, building community relations and creating national identity. The essays cover such topics as the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday; the importance of holidays for children; the mainstreaming of Kwanzaa; and the controversy over Columbus Day celebrations. Compelling and often surprising, this look at holidays and rituals brings new meaning to not just the ways we celebrate but to what those celebrations tell us about ourselves and our communities.

This book provides the essential, primary documentation needed to clarify, readjust, and, in some cases, destroy the many commonly held myths of America's colonial past. America's past is in many respects misunderstood and distorted. Even our secondary-level and college classrooms are not always capable of correcting the common misconceptions about Columbus and his discovery; Jamestown, John Smith, and Pocahontas; the Salem Witch Trials; and even the American Revolution. What is often lacking in texts on these events and people is a narrative with a solid underpinning of primary sources that clearly explains how misconceptions began, how they were perpetuated, and finally how they made their way into contemporary American popular culture. Colonial America: Facts and Fictions separates myth from reality. The authors explore 10 popular myths about the period, each of which is examined in terms of its origin and how it became ensconced in American memory.

Who were the Pilgrims? Far from the somberly clad, stern, and righteous figures children learn about in school, many of the early settlers of Plymouth actually dressed in bright colors, drank heavily, and often got into trouble.A surprising new look at America's founding fathers and mothers, The Times of Their Lives presents a realistic, factual account of the Plymouth colony based on contemporary archaeology, cultural research, and living history. Taking little known trial transcripts, personal accounts, wills and probate records, as well as physical artifacts such as shards and spoons unearthed from old foundations, James and Patricia Deetz reveal what life in seventeenth century Plymouth wasreallylike. In the process they blow the dust off the dull, wooden figures of tradition and show the people of Plymouth as vibrant individuals who lived out complex and colorful lives in a world profoundly different than our own.Beginning with an eyewitness account of the first Thanksgiving, The Times of Their Lives offers an often startling portrait of Plymouth Colony that includes aspects of the legal system, folk beliefs, family life, women's roles and gender issues, eating habits, alcohol use, sexual misconduct, domestic violence, suspicious deaths, and violent crimes.

New Netherland in a Nutshell covers the history of the Dutch colony that became the states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and parts of Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

In New Worlds for All, Calloway explores the unique and vibrant new cultures that Indians and Europeans forged together in early America. The process, Calloway writes, lasted longer than the United States has existed as a nation. During that time, most of America was still "Indian country," and even in areas of European settlement, Indians and Europeans remained a part of each other's daily lives: living, working, worshiping, traveling, and trading together - as well as fearing, avoiding, despising, and killing one another. Ranging across the continent and over 300 years, New Worlds for All describes encounters between Spanish conquistadors and Zuni warriors, Huron shamans and French Jesuit missionaries, English merchants and Montagnais traders. Calloway's discussion of conflict and cooperation includes the use of natural resources and shared knowledge about trail networks, herbal medicines, metal tools, and weapons.

Built primarily for public religious exercises, New England's wood-frame meetinghouses nevertheless were closely wedded to the social and cultural fabric of the neighborhood and fulfilled multiple secular purposes for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the only municipal building in the community, these structures provided locations for town and parish meetings. They also hosted criminal trials, public punishments and executions, and political and religious protests, and on occasion they served as defensive forts, barracks, hospitals, and places to store gunpowder. Today few of these once ubiquitous buildings survive. Based on site visits and meticulous documentary research, Meetinghouses of Early New England identifies more than 2,200 houses of worship in the region during the period from 1622 to 1830, bringing many of them to light for the first time.

The colonial scholar and political leader Cadwallader Colden was among the most learned American men of his time, and his history of the Iroquois tribes makes fascinating reading. The author discusses the religion, manners, customs, laws and forms of government of the confederacy of tribes composed of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, and gives accounts of battles, treaties, and trade with these Indians up to 1689. The book consists of Part I (1727) and Part II (1747) of The History of the Five Nations. The text is reprinted from the 1866 reprinting of the original editions.

Winner, 2008 Lawrence W. Levine Award, Organization of American Historians Tribe, Race, History examines American Indian communities in southern New England between the Revolution and Reconstruction, when Indians lived in the region's socioeconomic margins, moved between semiautonomous communities and towns, and intermarried extensively with blacks and whites. Drawing from a wealth of primary documentation, Daniel R. Mandell centers his study on ethnic boundaries, particularly how those boundaries were constructed, perceived, and crossed. He analyzes connections and distinctions between Indians and their non-Indian neighbors with regard to labor, landholding, government, and religion; examines how emerging romantic depictions of Indians (living and dead) helped shape a unique New England identity; and looks closely at the causes and results of tribal termination in the region after the Civil War.

Today, New York stands as the capital of American culture, business, and cosmopolitanism. Its size, influence, and multicultural composition mark it as a corner-stone of our country. The rich and varied history of early New York would seem to present a fertile topic for investigation to thoseinterested colonial America. Yet, there has never been a modern history of old New York--until this lively and detailed account by Michael Kammen.Gracefully written and comprehensive in scope, Colonial New York includes all of the political, social, economic, cultural, and religious aspects of New York's formative centuries. Social and ethnic diversity have always been characteristic of New York, and this was never so evident as in itsearly years. This period provides the contemporary reader with a backward glance at what the United States would become in the twentieth-century. Colonial New York stood as a precursor of American society and culture as a whole: a broad model of the American experience we witness today.

In telling the tragic and heroic story of Roanoke, the lost colony, award-winning historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman recovers the earliest days of English exploration and settlement in America the often forgotten years before Jamestown and the landing of the Mayflower. Roanoke explores Britain s attempt to establish a firm claim to North America in the hope that colonies would make England wealthy and powerful. Kupperman brings to life the men and women who struggled to carve out a settlement in an inhospitable environment on the Carolina coast and the complex Native American cultures they encountered. She reveals the mixture of goals and challenges that led to the colony s eventual abandonment, and discusses the theories about what might have become of the first English settlers in the New World as they adapted to life as Indians. With a new preface and afterword written by the author, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony brings the fascinating story of America s earliest settlement up-to-date, bringing together new work from scholars in a variety of fields.

In November of 1587, a report reached London claiming Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition to land English settlers in America had foundered. The colony on Roanoke Island off of the coast of North Carolina-115 men, women, and children-had disappeared without a trace. For four hundred years, the question of what became of the doomed settlers has remained unanswered. Where did they go? What really happened? Why were they on Roanoke Island in the first place, as that was not their destination? Using her consummate skills as an anthropologist and ethnohistorian, Lee Miller casts new light on the previously inexplicable puzzle of Roanoke, unraveling a thrilling web of deceit that can be traced back to the inner circle of Queen Elizabeth's government to finally solve the lasting mystery of the Lost Colony.

(EBook) A riveting narrative history of America's first colony, and its mysterious disappearance