Thanksgiving (United States) The most prominent historic thanksgiving event in American popular culture is the 1621 celebration at the Plymouth Plantation, where the settlers held a harvest feast after a successful growing season. Autumn or early winter feasts continued sporadically in later years, first as an impromptu religious observance and later as a civil tradition. The Plymouth settlers, known as Pilgrims, had settled in land abandoned when all but one of the Patuxet Indians died in a plague. After a harsh winter killed half of the Plymouth settlers, the last surviving Patuxet, Squanto (who had learned English and avoided the plague as a
History of Christianity in the United States most Christians in the United States are Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, or Roman Catholic. Because the Spanish were the first Europeans to establish settlements on the mainland of North America, such as St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, the earliest Christians in the territory which would eventually become the United States were Roman Catholics. However, the territory that would become the Thirteen Colonies in 1776 was largely populated by Protestants due to Protestant settlers seeking religious freedom from the Church of England (est. 1534). These settlers were primarily Puritans from East Anglia, especially just before the English Civil War (1641–1651); there were