RECAPPING PAST NEWS AND EVENTS
At its best, Thanksgiving is a reminder of how often people take life for granted. Families congregate to clog their arteries with entirely too much food and reflect on how lucky they are to do so. At its most awkward, the holiday is a reminder of why people feel grateful not to see their relatives every day. But behind the cavalcade of calories and potential shouting matches is a rich and sometimes heart-wrenching history. There are moments of privation, excess, and oddness that many people might not have heard of, let alone contemplated while cleaning their plates.
Below you'll find cannibals, animals, presidents, and a pirate. You'll find laughter, sorrow, and false beliefs in need of myth-busting –- because a day devoted to overeating should be seasoned by food for thought. Not everything you find will make you smile, but hopefully you'll be thankful that you read it. Here's the untold truth of Thanksgiving.
America's cannibal Thanksgiving
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you the Pilgrims didn't invent Thanksgiving because that's a historian's job. Plus, according to the Library of Congress, Native Americans had ceremonies for giving thanks long before the fabled 1621 feast in Plymouth that is often heralded as the basis for Thanksgiving. But even if we focus exclusively on the roots of the U.S. tradition, Plymouth seems like an arbitrary starting point because settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, had a food-related thanksgiving prayer service in 1610. So why does that earlier event get overlooked?
Jamestown curator Merry Outlaw blamed the omission of the 1610 ceremony on its ghastly backstory. Jamestown's colonists -– well, what was left of them –- had just survived the Starving Time by the skin of their teeth. Amid a bitter winter in which 80 percent of Jamestown's 300 settlers perished, the increasingly desperate colonists resorted to eating rats, horses, shoe leather, and ultimately human flesh. The famished few who lived were saved by British ships bearing food.
In 1619 Virginia had another thanksgiving service when Starving Time survivor Captain John Woodlief journeyed to the Berkley settlement on business. This second, less people-flavored celebration is the one Virginians tend to recognize as the "first" American Thanksgiving. Interestingly, JFK seemed to acknowledge this fact in a 1963 speech. But almost nobody credits poor, ignored Jamestown because some parts of history are hard to stomach, especially when those parts belong to people.
The beheading of 1623
Historical events are like faces: They sometimes get made up to conceal blemishes. America's Thanksgiving narrative is caked with makeup. The typical depiction, as summarized by Time, is a chummy three-day feast attended by at least 50 Pilgrims and 90 Native Americans in 1621 to commemorate a successful harvest made possible by helpful Natives. Peace between the groups allegedly lasted 10 years before an influx of European settlers brought a devastating plague and sowed the seeds of all-out war. In reality, there was more to the harmony than a harvest, and the violence erupted after two years.
Dr. Jack Dempsey, an expert in early American and Native American history, explained that the Pilgrims and Native Americans made a Thanksgiving treaty against a backdrop of dire conditions. In 1616 an epidemic annihilated tens of thousands of Native Americans along the Northeast coast, and a previously established peace with Europeans was plagued by conflict. The Pilgrims, meanwhile, were unprepared to brave the bitter winters of Plymouth. So the two groups agreed to get along out of desperation.
The Pilgrims soon grew paranoid and suspected the Native Americans planned to attack them. Captain Myles Standish preempted the suspected plot in 1623 by inviting the Massachusett tribe leader Wituwamat and several other Native men to a feast. It was a trap. Standish and his companions slaughtered their guests, beheaded Wituwamat, and mounted his head on the fort/church at Plymouth.
Thanksgiving used to be considered an abolitionist holiday
Thanksgiving forces families to confront the reality that sharing DNA doesn't mean sharing beliefs. Eventually holiday pleasantries will give way to squabbling over politics, religion, or which relative is a doody head. In such moments it might feel as if your family will split in two. But just remember: Your Uncle Sam got through worse. All it took was a bunch of cannons and bayonets.
Long before your hypothetical relatives were around to fling insults, Thanksgiving became a divisive issue in the lead-up to the Civil War. Not yet a national holiday, it was primarily celebrated in New England. This was essentially a geographical accident. New England was affiliated with the Pilgrims, and as detailed by Atlas Obscura, Thanksgiving staples like pumpkin pie were easier to prepare there because the ingredients were easier to grow there. However, the region's abolitionist leanings rubbed Southerners the wrong way.
Several pro-slavery states embraced Thanksgiving during the 1840s, per the LA Times, but by the 1850s tensions over slavery had intensified and Thanksgiving had grown in popularity across Northern states. As a result places like Virginia refused to celebrate it. Multiple newspapers slammed the so-called "abolitionist" holiday, with one calling it "little more than an occasion for indulgence in dissipation at the cost of character, health and slenderly provided purses." In 1863 President Lincoln called for an end to the quarreling and war and declared Thanksgiving a national celebration.
Canadians have an English pirate to thank for their Thanksgiving
Our northern neighbor, Canada, has its own national day of gratitude. Like the Yankee version, it includes family get-togethers and scrumptious turkey corpses, so it might seem like a copycat, or as the Canadians might call it, a mimic-moose. But according to Time, one reason Canadians wanted their own Thanksgiving was that they were grateful for not being Americans, who had ripped themselves asunder during the Civil War. A much cooler distinction is that Canada's holiday is tied to an English pirate.
That sea plunderer was Martin Frobisher, who became known for "preying on French trading vessels" in Guinea and searching for treasure, per PBS. Frobisher also made a name for himself as an explorer. In 1578, 43 years before the Pilgrims became famous for eating, he and his crew dropped anchor Newfoundland. Relieved that they didn't die, the men commemorated the moment with a Thanksgiving ceremony. It marked the first known European Thanksgiving in North America, per the Canadian Encyclopedia. Frobisher eventually died fighting the Spanish, but his journey lived on in Canadian lore. The country officially adopted Thanksgiving as an annual celebration in 1879.
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