Plymouth Colony Service issued a three hundred and fiftieth-year commemorative stamp recognizing the English dissenters first landing at the modern day settlement of Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1620. Each year, the United States celebrates a holiday known as Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is a federal holiday and frequently involves a family gathering with a large feast, traditionally featuring a turkey. Civic recognitions of the holiday typically include parades and football games. The holiday is meant to honor the First Thanksgiving, which was a harvest feast held in Plymouth in 1621, as first recorded in the book "New England's Memorial"
History of Massachusetts of the Indian population before the first large-scale arrival of settlers in the 1630s. Large numbers of natives were decimated by virgin soil epidemics such as smallpox, measles, influenza, and perhaps leptospirosis, against which they had no immunity. In 1617–1619, smallpox killed 90% of the Native Americans in the region. The first English settlers in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, established their settlement at Plymouth in 1620, and developed friendly relations with the native Wampanoag. This was the second successful permanent English colony in North America, after the Jamestown Colony. Before heading to the New World, they migrated to Holland to escape