At the first Thanksgiving in 1621, the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest after leaving England a year earlier in search of religious freedom in the New World. As bountiful as their crops had been, the Plymouth Colony would begin to see true success a few years later, after it dispensed with communal living in favor of private property rights.

Author, historian and chairman of the Plymouth Rock Foundation John Eidsmoe recently joined “1819 News: The Podcast” to tell the story of the First Thanksgiving and explain how the Pilgrims learned the folly of socialism after they were forced into it by their investors.

“The Merchant Adventurers were going to finance the colony. The colony in return would be producing furs and lumber and crops and fish and other things like this, and would

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