Every November, students across America return to the tale of the first Thanksgiving.  

While many are familiar with the story of the Pilgrims who arrived in the American colonies in pursuit of religious freedom, there’s more to it. Early American history is full of figures pursuing their freedom of religion, which helped shape a society that values pluralism and working toward a common good  

Here are some of the stories you might have missed:  

The Salzburgers 

The German-speaking Salzburgers were Lutheran colonists who had been expelled from Catholic Salzburg, located in present-day Austria. In 1731, the Catholic Archbishop announced the expulsion of Protestants, giving them just eight days to leave their homes. A pastor in Augsburg, Germany, asked King George the II of England for help. Being a German Duke and Lutheran, King George II was sympathetic to the Salzburg Protestants’ plight. He offered them a new home in his colony of Georgia.  

The Salzburgers arrived in Charleston in 1734 and proceeded to Savannah, where they were assigned a home by James Oglethorpe. Despite religious differences between the Lutherans and the other colonists, they remained on good terms and agreed to the prohibition of slavery within their community.  

Early Jewish Settlement  

When the Inquisition reached Portugal, many Jews fled to Brazil. A Jewish community was founded in the Dutch colony of Recife. After Recife was captured by the Portuguese in the mid-17th century, many Jews decided to flee. In a dramatic story, 23 Jewish settlers arrived in present-day New York from Brazil after having their ship captured by pirates and freed by a French privateer. There was opposition to their arrival. Peter Stuyvesant, the governor at the time, argued strongly against their presence. Nevertheless, the Dutch authorities ruled in 1656 that Jews would enjoy the same toleration in the colonies as they had in the Netherlands itself, chastising Stuyvesant. While the right to public worship was still restricted for some time, the community won other forms of economic and social acceptance. This community laid the groundwork for future Jewish migration to come.  

Haudenosaunee Confederacy 

The Haudenosaunee, called the Iroquois by the French and Five Nations by the English, are a confederation of five different Native American tribes. The exact time of its formation is unknown, but it predates Western colonization. This makes the Haudenosaunee Confederacy one of the oldest and longest running participatory democracies in the world. The founders studied the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a model for the constitution and wrote about them in the same documents as other constitutional influences, such as Montesquieu and Locke. Their constitution, known as The Great Law of Peace, provided for things like federalism, separation of powers, and what we today call freedom of religion. The Great Law is significant in its own right as well as influential to the writers who would later enshrine similar rights into the U.S. Constitution.  

The “Pennsylvania Dutch” 

William Penn founded Pennsylvania as a refuge for people of all Christian faiths to enjoy religious freedom and invited members of persecuted religious groups to take up residence. In the 1600s, the area that now makes up modern Germany was ravaged by war. Minority religious groups like pietists and anabaptists fled Germany for Pennsylvania in search of religious freedom. German Quakers, Moravians, Schwenkfelders,  Mennonites, Brethren, and Amish flocked to Germantown, a settlement just north of Philadelphia. The English settlers began referring to the newcomers as Pennsylvania Dutch, and together the groups developed a distinct language and culture.  

Huguenots  

In 1685, the French King revoked the edict that had permitted Protestants to live peacefully in Catholic France. French Protestants, known as Huguenots, fled. By 1700, the Governor of Virginia was welcoming 207 Huguenot refugees. The Huguenots settled in Manakin on the James River and inhabited the largest French settlement in the colonies. They were naturalized in 1704 and French congregations blended in with the Anglican ones a few years later. Both Paul Revere and George Washington had Huguenot ancestry.