I learned a lot of real history in this compelling conversation with historian and author, David J. Silverman. His most recent book is This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving, published by Bloomsbury in 2019, and talks about what life was like before the Europeans arrived and the first contact almost 100 years prior to the Mayflower. David also sheds light on what really unfolded in what is regarded as the original Thanksgiving.

David J. Silverman (Ph.D., Princeton, 2000) specializes in Native American, Colonial American, and American racial history.

He is also the author of Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge, MA., 2016); Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, 2010), and Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1871 (New York, 2005), and co-author of Ninigret, the Niantic and Narragansett Sachem: Diplomacy, War, and the Balance of Power in Seventeenth-Century New England and Indian Country (Ithaca, 2014). His essays have won major awards from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the New York Association of History.

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Read The Book That Inspires The Show

Paul Samuel Dolman, author, podcaster, and speaker, presents What Matters Most (the book!) a series of interview transcriptions from more than twenty inspirational Nashville and Tennessee residents including special guest journalist and author Bill Moyers.

Nashville Mayor Megan Barry,