Elizabeth Tilley's Love Of History

Proud of our ancestry and history, my mother uses our family tree to choose a name for each of her eleven children. So, understandably, many of us have nontraditional first or middle names. When my youngest sister was born, we all scratched our heads at the name Tilley. Excited to share her love of history, she explained that Elizabeth Tilley came to America on the Mayflower with her parents, who died in the first winter. Being homeschooled, my mother was able to teach us history through field trips all over the east coast. While many public schooled students were taught white-washed history, my siblings and I read biographies and autobiographies about renowned historical figures. My mother taught us about the lives of Squanto, Pocahontas, …show more content…
This same class required us to read a fictional book about Elizabeth Tilley, turning her into nothing but a part of a love triangle. Before this class, I had often realized I was taught different things as a homeschooler than my friends were at the public and private schools they attended. However, it took this book to personally offend me before I understood how poorly U.S. History is taught in the American school system. Many of my friends saw Native Americans as savages who either welcomed Europeans as superior or attacked like basic primeval animals. The American Indians are portrayed as having no hygiene or higher intelligence. In addition, we have been taught that the first settlers were English, and that Native Americans had never seen white men before. In actuality, Squanto himself had been kidnapped by white men, which is how he was able to communicate with the Mayflower colonists. Moreover, there had been Spanish colonization in southern area of the “New World” before the English founded Jamestown or Plymouth