Our kids are being taught that the founders fled England

[yardwork]

6. That's what I was taught in Ohio in the 1960s

Schools taught that the Pilgrims fled religious persecution and God led them to the New World where they could worship in peace. The Indians were friendly and welcomed their new white masters. It was all part of God's plan.

Inconvenient facts were ignored. School books didn't mention the earlier settlements in Virginia or the much earlier Spanish settlements in Florida, etc., because that would sound like imperialism and conquest, not righteous freedom from religious persecution. Anyway the settlers in Jamestown didn't make it so that was lame. Our God is not lame. Pilgrims!

Much later - like recently - I learned that what is now New England was almost deserted when the ships landed at Plymouth Rock. Diseases brought by earlier immigrants had wiped out the native people, leaving a fertile, planted region ripe for the "pilgrims."