#134 Sidebar: More Notes on Thanksgiving
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2023
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
The Nation, “Should America Keep Celebrating Thanksgiving?”
James Lee West, “A Native American Reflects on Thanksgiving”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 134. |
| 0:10.9 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on November 22nd, 23, in New Orleans. |
| 0:19.1 | We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States |
| 0:23.7 | from the beginning without intentional presentism. Sidebar is our term for an episode off the |
| 0:31.9 | timeline, which I do when I come across something interesting or in recognition of a holiday, such as Thanksgiving. |
| 0:39.9 | For the last couple of years, we've run an episode called Notes on Thanksgiving, |
| 0:45.1 | which first ran on Thanksgiving Day in 2021. Last year's was an encore presentation of that episode, |
| 0:53.2 | plus a new introduction. If you haven't listened to |
| 0:56.3 | either of those episodes, you might want to go back and listen to the encore presentation from |
| 1:00.7 | November 2022 before jumping into this one. This episode is a bit different and might better be |
| 1:08.3 | titled Thanksgiving, the dark side. |
| 1:12.7 | The good news is that it is still a history podcast and not even remotely about the |
| 1:18.3 | personally dark side of Thanksgiving, which includes traveling on the worst days of the year. |
| 1:24.7 | Disappointment over emotionally charged ceremonial compromises, pretending to |
| 1:29.6 | like food you actually don't like very much, or trying to make conversation with relatives |
| 1:35.0 | who are tedious, annoying, or both. Not that I have any such problems, but I've heard that |
| 1:41.3 | people do, mostly from reading the New York Times. |
| 1:45.5 | Those of you have listened to the notes on Thanksgiving episode know that I love Thanksgiving, |
| 1:51.0 | and think of it as the American Passover, an opportunity for us to remember where we came from, |
| 1:57.7 | for better and for worse. |
| 2:00.1 | At the same time, Thanksgiving is less historically genuine than many Americans have been |
| 2:06.7 | led to believe. The Thanksgiving story, as it was long taught in school, was constructed |
... |
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