Was reading "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn a while back. The coming holiday reminded me of his discussion of the Pilgrims' near starvation and the Native Americans' bailing them out by feeding them, that led to the US Thanksgiving holiday. Zinn argues that the Pilgrims nearly starved merely because they were completely lacking self sufficiency - not exactly the "pioneering spirit" that we Americans love to brag about. Their "crisis" was from a lack of any servants to gather food and cook for them. When the Natives stepped in to help the Pilgrims hoped they had discovered a new class of servants so they wouldn't have to figure out how to feed themselves. Zinn suggests that if the starving Pilgrims had more moxie they could have gorged on some of the estimated several million lobsters that were in the water around them instead of mooching off the Natives.
