The old Schoolhouse Rock spot No More Kings is a pretty good example of the phenomenon described by the OP. US history begins with the Mayflower, as far as 70s kids were being told.
And then there’s Socorro New Mexico founded in 1598 and it’s still there. The original point of contact is in what remains of the Midway Trailer Park. Modern Piro native American descendants trace their lineage to that event and are as exclusive as members of the Mayflower club.
The problem is that Midway Trailer Park isn’t as cool sounding as Plymouth Rock.
Bears repeating.
Jamestown-vs-Plymouth seems to be one of the weirder grudges that Professional Southerners hold.
Does it really?
Plymouth didn’t exactly collapse but it got subsumed by the more successful Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Likewise Jamestown didn’t exactly collapse. The statehouse did burn down so the folks decided to just move capitals to Williamsburg. The ‘meat’ of the colony was still there but shifted down the road a bit - literally a couple miles down the road.
It’s not even “Jamestown vs Plymouth”. It’s more that Jamestown is hardly taught at all. Certainly in grade school, my school system focused on US history as beginning with the Mayflower. If you had asked anybody middle school aged or younger in my town (and, actually, most older folks as well), they would have told you the first English colonies were at Plymouth and the general Massachusetts Bay area. It was not until high school that we learned anything different and even then, only a handful paid any attention.
We have, as a society, chosen to teach our own history a certain way. This happens everywhere to an extent, of course, but we should be cognizant that it happens and that it represents a deliberate choice on our part for better or worse.
In fairness, it should be pointed out that Disney doesn’t have a princess named Squanto.
They could always go with Weetamoo
I do not get this> Neither Lewis nor Clarke were English, and of course Mackenzie was a white male Anglo. L&C is taught as their expedition game the fledgling USA a claim to vast areas of North America. It was an important part of American history, but I do not remember it being taught as the first exped to cross the continent. Mackenzie is part of Canadian history, not USA.
Right.
I was taught about Jamestown and even Roanoke , Plymouth was about Thanksgiving.
Exactly.
The Virginia colonists celebrated Christmas. The Plymouth Puritans objected to that, and created an alternative holiday. Later Americans wanted both celebrations, and while Thanksgiving is associated with pilgrims, Christmas isn’t associated with Jamestown. Should have created Pocahontas Day or something.
I know there is an ongoing campaign to declare that Christmas is largely secular, but this is ridiculous.
Oops. Fixed
Based on later comments in the thread, I have two observations:
I’m not sure what was being taught in the 1970s, but in the 1950s and 1960s, I was taught about Jamestown (and Roanoke) and was well aware that they preceded Plymouth Plantation…
I was never taught that Plymouth was the “birthplace of America.” I was taught that the Mayflower Compact was revolutionary in its self-governing principles and set a precedent, the first in relatively modern history, from which later people in North America could take their ideas of self-governance.
I was challenged by a Jamestown advocate, but I stand by my assertion. One of the objections to my point was that the Mayflower Compact was not really original since pirates had operated under similar rules regarding the selection of officers and the creation of laws. However, piracy, itself, had undergone a change of culture in the middle of the 17th century and the earliest citations appear only in the 1690s, seventy years after the 1620 Compact. (Ships’ articles that laid out divisions of labor and plunder date as early as the 14th century, but the references to the crew setting those rules do not appear until around 1700.)
Regarding Lewis and Clark: I was never taught that they were the first to traverse the continent, only that they embarked on a marvelous exploration of the Louisiana Purchase and were the first to make a land journey to the Pacific in the U.S.
I think a factor that’s being overlooked here is that colonial Plymouth had a way better publicist.
Longfellow’s famous poem “The Courtship of Miles Standish”, set in 1612 and published in 1858, was a runaway bestseller in 19th-century America as well as among British readers. It was taught in schools, it inspired probably some hundreds of paintings, and along with “Hiawatha” and “Evangeline” it made Longfellow the unofficially acknowledged “poet laureate of America” for generations. I don’t think it’s possible to understand the place of Plymouth in the American historical imagination without taking that poem into account.
That’s true. It’s also true that the story of Pocahontas was celebrated nationally in the 19th century, and that the Jamestown Exposition of 1907 was a big deal and included the Post Office issuing commemorative stamps of Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of Jamestown.
You’d think that would have an effect on textbooks in the 20th century. And once something gets into a textbook, mountains of cultural change are needed to extract it.
Admittedly, the Mayflower got a 300th anniversary stamp of its own in 1920.
That’s the problem with history: there’s too much of it. What exactly textbooks said is a matter for experts. We must be talking about hundreds of textbooks over decades of time in thousands of schools. Making gross generalizations about that is futile.
And there’s only so much classroom time to teach it. Which is why 99.99% of Americans are unaware that there were two French colonies the preceded Jamestown. And not those in Canada, either. They both failed due to conflicts with other colonial powers, which is probably another reason they aren’t taught.
The first was Fort Caroline, established in 1564 in what is now Florida and intended as a refuge for Huguenots. You wonder why St Augustine was established? Well, it was due to Fort Caroline. The Spanish heard about this colony and sent a force to remove it. There was a small war between the two which the French lost due to the misfortune of their fleet running into a storm. The survivors surrendered to the Spanish who then massacred them as heretics. St Augustine was established by the Spanish force to assert their claim to the area.
The other was Port Royal, at what is now Annapolis MD in 1605. That one was abandoned a couple years later, but then re-established in 1610. By then Jamestown had been established. The English learned of the French colony and sailed over there and burned it down. [Note: if you try to google about this one, you may get hits for Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia. The two places were both originally French places named Port Royal and then renamed for Queen Ann.]
Also, at one point, there was a Spanish colony established in the Chesapeake region, but it was wiped out by indigenes.
And more every day! 
Actually there were two English colonies founded in 1607, Jamestown by the Virginia Colony and the Popham Colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River in what is now Maine by the Plymouth Company. The latter failed during the first winter and the former barely made it requiring 3 different charters to keep it going. The final charter was in 1611 and granted Virginia land from sea to sea north of the 29th parallel with that weird northwesterly pointing northern boundary you’ve probably seen.
It really wasn’t until about 1617-1619 that the Virginia Colony was always on its deathbed. I think 1617 was their first exported crop of tobacco while the latter year was when the first slaves were introduced and a ship of single English ladies came. It was also the year they Established the House of Burgesses.
The reintroduced Plymouth Colony of 1620 was successful faster.
Yeah, I was taught about Roanoke and Jamestown, but Plymouth was given more space because: 1) the Thanksgiving tradition, and 2) the settlers at Plymouth only partially, but not completely, shit all over the indigenous people like what happened in Jamestown. It’s just a better story to tell, but no teacher ever told me that Plymouth was first.
I’d say that the Pilgrims behaved far worse than the Virginians toward the Indians. Besides their persecutions, wars, slaughter of people given truces, and destruction of their hunting grounds, the leaders actively attacked and drove out settlers who worked with the natives instead of against them. That’s just not the story you’re told in high school.
I just read a novel set in Boston in the 1660s. It seemed to have been pretty decently researched.
Not sure why anyone would want to trace their lineage back to those intolerant assholes.
John P. Marquand wrote a couple of good books about that society. Born into it, but lacking the funds to be accepted, he’d been given the cold shoulder by a subspecies predisposed to cold-shoulderness.