Thanksgiving dinner. (Drazen Zigic | Getty Images Plus)

For many decades, Americans have celebrated the notion that the first Thanksgiving represented a warm and solemn celebration in which kind-hearted Native people broke bread with and welcomed European immigrants to the New World.

As historians have documented in recent years, however, the truth was more complex and not nearly as inspiring.

In truth, the first Thanksgiving was less a warm and fuzzy moment of shared blessings than it was an accidental and awkward three-day truce between two half-starving and disease-decimated groups in the midst of a series of complex wars.

None of this is to denigrate the modern concept of Thanksgiving or the idea of people of all kinds coming together to give thanks for the bounty of the Earth.

But like so many other truths of American history, we do a disservice to the present and to the Native peoples who first populated the continent by sanitizing things.

The bottom line: Maybe if all Americans understood this history a little better, we might do a better job in the present of practicing the ideals we profess to celebrate.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.