Thank you for printing "The First Thanksgiving" editorial. It was a breath of fresh air and gives lie to the A.P. article the day before: "Cultural sensitivity or self-loathing?".
      How sad that this teacher ruined such an uplifting, happy occasion for his students. It’s even sadder that the teacher probably thought the lesson he was teaching was true. Why? Most current school history books are written by revisionist historians or by people who use them as sources rather than taking the time to research primary sources. Your use of a primary source allows people to come to their own conclusions rather than advancing a political or social agenda.
      However, there are problems. Very few people are exposed to primary source documents; and, according to William Bennett (Sec. of Educ. under Reagan) in a Department of Education report,...less than five percent of high school juniors and seniors have the skills necessary to comprehend a primary source historical document. Do some people in power want "the masses" to remain ignorant? The Common School Almanac of 1839 states. "A demagogue would like a people half educated; enough to read what he says, but not enough to know whether it is true or not." Thomas Jefferson warned, "If a nation expects to be ignorant–and free–in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
       

 The above is an unpublished letter to the editor by Defender written in response to a news artical on a school teacher who told his students that the pilgims stole land from the Indians when they landed in 1620.  (For the record; the land that the pilgrims settled in had belonged to the Pataxut tribe.  The entire tribe had been wiped out by a plague a few years before.  When the pilgrims came they settled in unclaimed and unihabited land.)

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