This episode will be easier to follow if you have recently listened to our previous Thanksgiving Sidebar, "Notes on Thanksgiving."

Thanksgiving is less historically genuine than many Americans were led to believe.  The Thanksgiving story, as it was long taught in school, was constructed to achieve a purpose: the unification of an increasingly diverse country around a national story. It worked incredibly well. Italians, Irish, eastern Europeans, and other immigrants who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century learned a version of our national origin story in a celebration of community that brought the country together when it very much needed it. But that success came at a price – it could and did alienate at least some of our people who were descended from North America’s indigenous peoples, including especially tribes of New England.  The success of Thanksgiving in binding together an ever more diverse country and the alienation of people who do not celebrate the European settlement of North America is the story of this episode.

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Selected references for this episode

Sidebar: Notes on Thanksgiving (Encore Presentation)

Elizabeth Pleck, "The Making of the Domestic Occasion: The History of Thanksgiving in the United States," Journal of Social History, Summer 1999.

Jana Weiss, "The National Day of Mourning: Thanksgiving, Civil Religion, and American Indians," Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2018.

Christopher Hitchens, "The Turkey Has Landed," The Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2005.

Freedom from Want

The Mayflower Compact

Occupation of Alcatraz

National Day of Mourning

Red Power Movement

The Nation, "Should America Keep Celebrating Thanksgiving?"

James Lee West, "A Native American Reflects on Thanksgiving"