Many sites point out that only Edward Winslow’s brief account records Plymouth Colony’s 1621 harvest festivities, beyond which we have just William Bradford’s seasonal comment that the Pilgrims ate turkey among other things. (My thanksgiving is bigger than your thanksgiving?) Several sites claim that Indians had six thanksgivings every year at least one says that every day, every act, every thought was carried out with thanksgiving by pre-contact Indians. Local boosters in Virginia, Florida, and Texas promote their own colonists, who (like many people getting off a boat) gave thanks for setting foot again on dry land. With heavy self-importance and pathetic political posturing, they demonstrate quite unsurprisingly that what was once taught in grade school lacked scope, subtlety, and minority insight.Ĭommonly the first point scored is that lots of people gave thanks before the Pilgrims did it in 1621. Almost all the corrections are themselves incorrect or banal. Very few present anything like the myths that most claim to combat. Surveying more than two hundred websites that “correct” our assumptions about Thanksgiving, it’s possible to sort them into groups and themes, especially since Internet sites often parrot each other.
I think that a historian approaching the question of Thanksgiving Day in the “ever changing Now” will need to ask “the wrong question” – what of all this is true? “And that’s all it needs to be”? I disagree. For these holidays say much less about who we really were in some specific Then, than about who we want to be in an ever changing Now.” Was the ‘first Thanksgiving’ merely a pretext for bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?’, “To ask whether this is true is to ask the wrong question. whether Plymouth’s ‘Pilgrims’ were indeed the grave-robbing hypocrites that UAINE describes. But should historians bother? Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Brandeis, asks on the website Common-Place (in 2001) whether it’s worth while “to plumb the bottom of it all – to determine, for example.
Setting people straight about Thanksgiving myths has become as much a part of the annual holiday as turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie.
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