Most of us learned the stories in elementary school. In 1607, a band of entrepreneurs and adventurers settled in Virginia, naming their settlement Jamestown in honor of their king. Here, Pocahontas allegedly saved John Smith from execution, and Smith, in turn, saved the starving colony by paraphrasing and enforcing the scriptural adage, “He that will not work will not eat.”
Nearly 500 miles north, another company of English settlers landed in 1620 in what we today call Massachusetts, founding a colony there, Plymouth. The stalwarts of these colonizers were the Pilgrims, who had sailed to the New World seeking freedom of religion and an escape from political persecution.
