Contrary to what grade-school legends would have us believe, the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated in late November; most likely it occurred at the end of September or in very early October. And, with the arrival of the Indian leader Massasoit and hundreds of his followers "bearing five freshly killed deer," the event "soon became an overwhelming Native celebration," rather than the pious English festival we commemorate today.

This is one of many choice tidbits in Nathaniel Philbrick's absorbing and exceedingly well researched history of the Plymouth Colony. In fact, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War is so interesting in so many ways that readers will come away from it with a profoundly different understanding – and deeper appreciation – of the people (Native Americans and colonists, alike) and events that have been flattened over the course of almost three centuries into a lifeless national mythology.

"I think it's really important that we see the past as a lived past rather than something that was fated to be," Philbrick says during a call to Providence, Rhode Island. Philbrick is on his way home to Nantucket Island, where he and his wife, a third-generation Cape Codder, and their two children have lived for almost 20 years. "We look at this story as if the outcome had been determined from the very beginning, but that is not how they saw it. So with this book I was really trying to recreate the sense of how precarious it was."

Philbrick won the National Book Award in 2000 for In the Heart of the Sea, his harrowing account of the 1820 sinking of the whaling ship Essex and the struggle of its crew to survive. Ever since, he says, he has "been writing survival stories in one way another. What fascinated me about this story was that this was a survival story in three layers."

After many delays and a horrible sea journey, the Pilgrims arrived at the wrong time of year on a coast where three years before a thriving, populous Native community had been decimated by a plague brought to the Americas by European fisherman. The first year after the Mayflower landed was a physical and psychological struggle for survival for both Natives and Pilgrims alike, as Philbrick shows in riveting detail. The shrewd political calculations of Chief Massasoit and his remarkable relationship with Edward Winslow eventually laid the groundwork for a half-century of amazing – if hard-won – accommodation between settlers and Natives, the second layer of Philbrick's survival tale. But the succeeding generations of Pilgrims and Natives, grown greedy and comfortable on one side and resentful and hard-pressed on the other, moved inexorably toward the largely forgotten and incredibly brutal "King Philip's War," which, Philbrick argues convincingly, announced the tragic, archetypal pattern of conflict that continental expansion would follow for the next two centuries.

As guides through this lesser-known but fascinating era, Philbrick follows two dominant, articulate personalities: William Bradford, the leader of the first generation of Pilgrims, and William Church, a prescient and "gleefully impious" representative of the third generation of colonists. Philbrick is equally good at illuminating the character of the other major players in this history – Miles Standish, Edward and Josiah Winslow, Mary Rowlandson, Squanto, Chief Massasoit and his son, King Philip – none of whom is quite the paragon or villain portrayed in the standard national mythologies.

"My education as an elementary and high school student was that the Pilgrims were the example of everything that was good about America. Then I went to college and the story was that the evil Europeans annihilated the innocent Native Americans," Philbrick says. "But as I delved into this on my own, I saw that this was a tragedy in terms of the overarching dynamic. They all were people who were struggling heroically (or in a cowardly fashion) and who had a lot to say about what was happening to them, rather than being powerless victims."

Philbrick developed his informative, eminently readable, person-centered approach to writing history in several earlier books about the history of Nantucket and of seafaring. An English major at Brown, Philbrick learned to write during a stint at the magazine Sailing World. He had been a competitive sailboat racer as a teenager and in college, a passion he says he developed on a manmade lake near "that most nautical of places, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania," where his father was a university professor. Philbrick met his wife when both were teaching sailing on Cape Cod.

While it took him three years to compose Mayflower, Philbrick says he actually worked on the book for almost 13 years. "When I was writing my first history of Nantucket, I realized that if I was going to understand its origins as an English settlement I would have to go back to the Pilgrims and the Indians," he says. He found that the English side was well documented. But to understand the Native side he had to "look at oral traditions, archeology, folklore. I realized that exploring the Native American past requires a whole different side of the brain almost, a whole different discipline. I took a couple of years just coming up to speed in that way."

The result of this lengthy inquiry is a history that reads like tragedy, that is populated by fallible humans on all sides and that resounds with what-if moments. Philbrick does not see as inevitable this first major war between Indians and the English (in which the English lost eight percent of their male population and Native Americans of southern New England lost 60 to 80 percent of its people, including those sold into slavery by the Puritans). But once it did happen, King Philip's War set the pattern of conflict for centuries to come.

"If Josiah Winslow and Philip had only decided to just talk, as their fathers had, we would have had a profoundly different New England history. But it didn't happen," Philbrick says. "The Pilgrims didn't come here on the Mayflower to empire build or to remove a population, but in the wake of that war, that's exactly what they did."

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War is one of the best histories of unintended consequences you're ever likely to read.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

America’s Founding Fathers tackled many thorny questions from the pursuit of happiness to the separation of powers but they never had to confront such controversial issues as stem cell research, Social Security or campaign finance reform. With the Founders held in high esteem, and modern politicians viewed with considerable contempt, it’s not surprising that many Americans wonder how the men who formed our nation’s government might handle today’s most difficult problems.

Journalist and historian Richard Brookhiser offers a witty and thought-provoking response in What Would the Founders Do? Their Questions, Our Answers. Plumbing the Founders’ recorded musings, Brookhiser speculates on such matters as how Alexander Hamilton would react to Hurricane Katrina (he would expect city, state and federal executives to demonstrate energy in their response) and what Thomas Jefferson might think of assisted suicide (he would support it). It quickly becomes apparent that Brookhiser, while respectful of the Founders, is no sacred textualist. He is clearly more interested in spotlighting provocative ideas than he is in presenting correct ones.

Speaking from his home in New York, Brookhiser says his inspiration for the book came from people asking him WWFD questions every time he spoke about the Founders. When he told his wife that one of his lectures on Alexander Hamilton, his historical specialty, had sparked four such inquiries, she suggested that they should be the subject of his next book. (His earlier books include Rules of Civility, Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton and The Adamses.) I tried to find as realistic answers as I could, he explains. I think the only time I’m close to being totally tongue-in-cheek is [with] the one on campaign finance reform where I say it’s a wonder that James Madison and Gouverneur Morris ever got elected to anything. I’ve been a political journalist for almost 30 years for National Review, Brookhiser explains. The way I generated the questions [was that] I just thought, What am I writing about with my National Review hat on? All the editorials that I and my colleagues write, what are they all about? . . . So I said, OK, pitch all these balls to the Founders and see how they swing at them. It was like writing 60 articles. Brookhiser rejects the notion that the Founders were all over the map philosophically and thus unlikely to be of a single mind about anything. I would say that were often all over the map politically, but I wouldn’t say [they were] philosophically. There were certain core principles that they all agreed on. It’s very interesting that the Continental Congress made lots of changes in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration [of Independence]. But they did not touch what we regard as the most famous parts of it the opening. Hardly anything was done to that. People look to the Founders for guidance, Brookhiser thinks, because America is still a young country. They’re not that far away, he says. They’re closer than Charlemagne. And yet we have old institutions. The presidency goes back to 1789; Congress goes back to 1774. You compare that to five French republics and two empires and two kingdoms, and we have lots of continuity. Maybe the most important thing is that the Founders were politicians, and they were recognizably like modern politicians. They had to run for office. They had to say what they thought. They debated with each other. Another strand of relevance, Brookhiser notes, was that the Founders were future-oriented. They were very mindful of working for posterity and of the world watching them as examples. This was a little country, on the edge of things. But when they’re at the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry said, If we fail, we will disappoint the world.’ In an appendix, Brookhiser has some fun with the Founders when he imagines them as modern-day bloggers. The industrious Ben Franklin has three blogs Dirtyoldman, Keytech and YouSucceed to present his sides as a sensualist, scientist and self-help guru. Sam Adams blogs under BeerandLiberty. If these guys were alive now, he says, of course they’d be blogging. . . . The Patriot Act forbids me from telling you how I’m in contact with the Founders, but be assured that I am. If the author can fathom what the Founders would think about intelligent design, then it seems fair to ask him how they’d view this book about them. I think none of them would quarrel with [me] trying to do it in a popular way, he says. Almost all of them wrote journalism. Franklin would like it to the extent that it’s humorous and pulling people’s legs. In terms of what I’m saying about their thoughts, I’m sure I’d get a lot of quarrels because I’m bluntly presenting quarrels that they had. Jefferson would say, Why are you presenting Hamilton’s argument so well? I mean, really, come on!‘ And vice versa. So I’m sure I’d get a lot of that. In a way, I’m glad they’re dead. I’m sure I’d be fielding a lot of correspondence. Edward Morris is a Nashville-based writer.

During war, there are no holidays. But historian Stanley Weintraub knows well that holidays can affect the way war is waged, from the celebrated Christmas Truce of World War I to Hitler’s brutal attack during the final winter of World War II.

In his new book, 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944, Weintraub shows how Hitler took advantage of the Allies’ Yuletide cheer to launch the 1944 surprise attack that became known as the Battle of the Bulge, one of the bloodiest clashes of the war.

So imminent was an Allied victory in those waning weeks of the European theater that some troops had already taken leave from the front to enjoy the holiday in Paris. Hitler was counting on just such a seasonal lapse as he secretly amassed his remaining ragtag divisions in the Ardennes Forest for one last offensive. The Nazis, short on strategy, were helped by 10 days of driving snow and rain that prompted Gen. George Patton’s famous plea to God, "Sir, whose side are you on?"

The weather cleared as Patton requested, Allied air strikes commenced, and ground troops converged to take Bastogne on Dec. 26, effectively ending Hitler’s conquest. As Weintraub illustrated in his two previous books, General Washington’s Christmas Farewell and Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914, Christmas and other religious observances often play pivotal roles in military history.

"The Japanese, for example, planned the Pearl Harbor attack for Sunday. Very often, major offensive surprise attacks occur on a Sunday because it is assumed that, in a largely Christian West, Sunday will be a time when people are less alert and will be doing other things," says Weintraub, the Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State.

The Germans were equally aware that, with the war in its 11th hour, Allied troops were less inclined to take risks. " The Germans would broadcast over loudspeakers, ‘How would you like to die for Christmas?’" he says. "They counted on a relaxation at Christmas, and they were quite right." The Allied commanders couldn’t have been more different in style or temperament. British Field Marshal Montgomery, whose troops had suffered most in the early years of the war, was a national hero and cautious to a fault. Omar Bradley, pulled from the Pacific theater, was a fish out of water. George Patton, a born warrior and deeply religious man, saw no contradiction in asking God for good killing weather.

"The real hero was George Patton. He was a fighting general and the troops loved him," says Weintraub. "He was certainly the most aggressive general, but he was off-the-wall; there was no one like him. When he was killed in an automobile crash at the end of the war, I think it might have been the best end for him because he was not a civilian. He was not the kind of person who could sit at a desk." Weintraub leavens his military history with celebrity cameos. Sultry Marlene Dietrich receives frostbite and lice in return for her Christmas goodwill tour to the front, where she exchanged intimate holiday greetings with several officers including Patton. David Niven, then an unknown British intelligence officer, tries to keep Allied codes current to thwart German spies. Even Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is spotted en route to Dresden his experiences there inspired Slaughterhouse-Five.

Weintraub saw two Christmases on the front lines first-hand as a soldier in the 8th Army Division in Korea. "Because the cultures were so different, we could not have a Christmas in which the enemy across the line celebrated, too," he says. The same holds true today in Iraq. Barring a sudden outbreak of hostilities between the United States and Canada, he sees little opportunity for Christmas to play a major role in wars to come.

"I don’t think it could happen today. The idea of a common Western culture in which Christmas is both a secular and a religious holiday shared by the enemy as well just can’t happen anymore."

Jay MacDonald will celebrate the holidays at his new home in Austin, Texas.