Every day of the holiday season, there is probably someone in your neighborhood watching or reading some version of A Christmas Carol. If you think about it, that means we probably see early Victorian England as often as any other time period. What has kept the story so vital? And how did a young Charles Dickens engender so much empathy for such a miserable man?

As an icon, Squanto is known, but he isn’t really known. What Santa is to Christmas and the Easter Bunny is to Easter, Squanto is to Thanksgiving. He is a sense memory from childhood. He’s more than a man, or really much less than a man, now. He is a symbol.

There he is smudged into the paint of the handprint turkey you made in kindergarten.

You don’t need to go visit Squanto – have kids and at some point when they’re in elementary school, he’ll come to you in the form of Timmy with the gap in his front teeth dressed in a fringe vest and a feather headband.

We’re going to spend the next few episodes of the podcast in Plymouth, thinking about the icons the Pilgrims have left behind leading up to their ultimate legacy, Thanksgiving and those handprint turkeys. As a first step, let’s exhume Squanto from the smudged paint, and restore to him not just some dignity but some agency.

Sarah Josepha Hale, editress of Godey's Lady's Book, dedicated years of her life to the crusade to make Thanksgiving a national holiday - she was successful. And yet, Reverend Alexander Young wrote one footnote about Thanksgiving, and he may have inadvertently done more to change the history of the holiday (and the history of the Pilgrims). This is the story of the "First" Thanksgiving.

That deep dive takes us to the island where Jaws was shot, Martha's Vineyard, as well as Nantucket, the nearby island where Jaws might have been shot if snow hadn't forced the ferry Production Designer Joe Alves was on to turn back towards the mainland.  

Along the way, we'll meet father and son authors who both turned their off-islander experiences into hit Hollywood movies - We'll consider how Universal Studios Orlando tricked me into thinking Jaws was set in California - We'll reconcile our preconceived notions of the Vineyard as a rich person's playground with the fact that the island was chosen because it was lower-middle class enough to pass for economically vulnerable Amity Island - And we'll celebrate the performances of islanders, with special focus on Lee Fierro's work as grieving mother Mrs. Kintner.

Transcript here: https://iconographypodcast.com/articles/interview-w-brian-logan-communications-director-s1!677ae

Maybe the reason Plymouth Rock is so frequently seen as underwhelming is because all the fascinating stories of how people who love the Rock have hurt it aren’t well known enough. People love telling stories about cool scars! Maybe if we all knew more of Plymouth Rock’s scar stories, visitors would be appropriately whelmed.

Our guest Matt Villamaino certainly thinks so, and so we put on a little history pageant so you could listen in to the long strange history of Plymouth Rock.

Transcript here: https://iconographypodcast.com/articles/plymouth-rock-a-pageant-episode-transcript-s1!4eeff

Transcript here: https://iconographypodcast.com/articles/s1!eb6d2

This episode, Dr. Anna Scott and Jo Loosemore of Mayflower 400 ring in Forefathers' Day with their thoughts on how we connect with the Pilgrims in 2020.

Transcript here: https://iconographypodcast.com/articles/the-mayflower-episode-transcript-s1!12d40

There he is smudged into the paint of the handprint turkey you made in kindergarten.

You don’t need to go visit Squanto – have kids and at some point when they’re in elementary school, he’ll come to you in the form of Timmy with the gap in his front teeth dressed in a fringe vest and a feather headband.

We’re going to spend the next few episodes of the podcast in Plymouth, thinking about the icons the Pilgrims have left behind leading up to their ultimate legacy, Thanksgiving and those handprint turkeys. As a first step, let’s exhume Squanto from the smudged paint, and restore to him not just some dignity but some agency.

In our attempt to figure out how the Citgo Sign was saved, we're joined by first-time Boston Marathon runner Andy Luce.

This episode:

• How the NSA shows up in mainstream entertainment
• So many Bond themes
• Melissa McCarthy showing the men (mostly Statham) how it’s done
• Kingsman’s scathing class critique
• Ilya Kuryakin and the demonized other
• Bridge of Spies and the reality of spy craft
• The wonders of Ilsa Faust
• The murky waters of Sicario
• A cameo appearance from HERCULES MULLIGAN!

It would have been the first time you had ever seen the Times honor a fictional person with an obituary, let alone on the front page. It would be the last time you would see it as well.

This episode, we consider what factored into the Queen of Crime's decision to kill one of fiction's greatest detectives.

There once was a scholar at Cambridge who dedicated probably 90% of his adult waking hours to scholarship - cataloging dusty old manuscripts, caring for fragile old artifacts, studying creaky old churches. He never married, never had children, never retired. In the other 10% of his time, for kicks, he wrote and recited stories… stories about bachelor scholars went looking for dusty old manuscripts, found fragile old artifacts, and poked around creaky old churches, and oh yeah, these things were all cursed and studying them meant confronting unspeakable horrors.

M.R. James is iconic because of what he did in those rare moments he wasn’t giving his heart and soul to academia - those nights and weekends when he smirked and wondered “How can I scare the crap out of my friends?”

I went to the HisWorld exhibition at the Salisbury Museum to find out.

This is a remastered 2nd edition of Iconography episode 3, with additional bonus content created in December 2021. To hear the original 1st edition, produced and published in December 2016, go here.