The Pilgrims founded their colony at Plymouth Plantation in December 1620 and promptly started dying off in droves.

As the colony’s early governor, William Bradford, wrote in “Of Plymouth Plantation“:

That which was most sadd & lamentable was, that in 2. or 3. moneths time halfe of their company dyed.

When the settlers finally stopped croaking, they set about creating a heaven on earth, a society without private property, where all worked for the common good. Everything was shared. Especially bitching and moaning about working for the common good. Bradford again:

Yong-men that were most able and fitte for labour and service did repine that they should spend their time and streingth to worke for other mens wives and children, with out any recompense….And for men’s wives to be commanded to doe service for other men, as dresing their meate, washing their cloaths, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brooke it.

With nobody working, everybody was suffering. And in case you think nobody was working simply because they couldn’t understand a damn thing Bradford was saying, chew on this: In 1623, Bradford and the other leaders

…assigned to every family a parceel of land…this had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more torne was planted then other waise would have bene by any means the Govr or any other could use, and saved him a great deall of trouble, and gave farr better contente.

In no time at all

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Misguided leftists can learn a lot from American history. They can learn a lot, specifically, from the lessons provided us by the Pilgrims clinging to life on the Massachusetts coast in 1623 and by the wide-eyed British invaders who set foot on the New World in 1776.

Just ask Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough, two of the nation’s most popular contemporary historians.

I couldn’t help but notice very illuminating (and perhaps unintended) odes to traditional conservative values in recent works by each author about pivotal moments in American history.

The first illuminating passage came in Philbrick’s spectacular book, “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War.”

He does an incredible job of taking the pop-culture caricature of the Pilgrims and bringing their real story to life – real humans with real struggles and hopes and dreams.

You know the basic story of the early days of the Plymouth Colony. The settlers had trouble feeding themselves in the first few years, to the point that starvation was a very real problem. But they quickly found a solution.

Here are Philbrick’s words:

“The fall of 1623 marked the end of Plymouth’s debilitating food shortages. For the last two planting seasons, the Pilgrims had grown crops communally … but as the disastrous harvest of the previous fall had shown, something drastic needed to be done to increase the annual yield.”

So here’s what happened:

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