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Additional resources for this issue of History Now
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Thanksgiving
To get an overview of the holiday's history and the available
resources, start with:
Appelbaum, Diana Karter. Thanksgiving: An American
Holiday, An American History. (New York: Facts On
File, 1984).
Family Internet's "Thanksgiving History" page gives useful links to other Web resources for the history and evolution of this holiday:
http://familyinternet.about.com/od/thanksgivinghistory/index.htm
As you'd expect, a Google search for "Thanksgiving Day" buries you in an avalanche of hits for commercially oriented sites - many sponsored by greeting card companies. Here are some non-commercial sites that should be helpful. This one at the Smithsonian provides basic information on the seventeenth-century celebration of the feast and gives a useful bibliography:
http://www.si.edu/resource/faq/nmah/thanks.htm
The Plimoth Plantations historic site provides an astonishing range of material, from studies of the Wampanoag to recipes for Thanksgiving meals:
http://www.plimoth.org/learn/history/
The same website has a teacher's guide that includes a section called, "You Are the Historian: Investigating the First Thanksgiving":
http://www.plimoth.org/OLC/index_js2.html
"America's Homepage," a site maintained by Plymouth, Massachusetts, has good original material on the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, as well as reliable links to other sites. You may find the site's "Virtual Tour of Plimoth Plantation" especially intriguing:
http://pilgrims.net/plimothplantation/vtour/
On the evolution of Thanksgiving into a national holiday
in the new nation, see this essay on the ways in which
Washington avoided offending Jewish Americans by refusing
to make Thanksgiving a "Christian" holiday:
Klein, Rose S. "Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamations." American Jewish Archives 20, no. 2 (1968), 156-62.
Sarah Josepha Hale, the nineteenth-century journalist who led the campaign to
make Thanksgiving a permanent government observance has
received a good deal of attention recently. You can start
with these books and articles:
Finley, Ruth E. The Lady of Godey's, Sarah Josepha
Hale. (Philadelphia, London: J. B. Lippincott Company,
1931).
Hill, Ralph Nading. "Mr. Godey's Lady." American
Heritage 9, no. 6 (1958): 20-7, 97-101.
Hoffman, Nicole Tonkovich. "Legacy Profile: Sarah Josepha
Hale (1788-1879)." Legacy 7, no. 2 (1990), 47-55.
Rogers, Sherbrooke. Sarah Josepha Hale: A New England
Pioneer, 1788-1879. (Grantham, NH: Tompson & Rutter,
1985).
Wills, Anne Blue. "Pilgrims and Progress: How Magazines
Made Thanksgiving." Church History 72, no. 1
(2003): 138-58.
And then move onto this website, which provides an excellent brief sketch of Hale by Lisa Niles - and don't ignore the first-rate selection of links from this page:
http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/hale1.html.
Here is an account of the way in which the date of the
Thanksgiving holiday became permanently set:
Chessman, G. Wallace. "Thanksgiving: Another FDR Experiment."
Prologue 22, no. 3 (1990): 273-85.
If you have a chance, look at this series of articles by William Petersen, in
which he traces the evolution of the event as a national
holiday and then turns to the ways it has been celebrated
in Iowa and Iowa public schools:
"Thanksgiving in America." Palimpsest 49, no.
12 (1968): 545-55.
"Thanksgiving in Iowa." Palimpsest 49, no. 12
(1968): 556-76.
"Thanksgiving in Iowa Schools." Palimpsest 49,
no. 12 (1968): 577-608.
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