"It's a good thing conservatives know nothing about the actual history of this country they claim to love so much-otherwise, they'd probably launch a War on Thanksgiving. That's because, if you study the path that Thanksgiving took on the way to its current culturally dominant presence in the calendar, it becomes clear that it's low-key one of America's wokest holidays."
"Far from being an eternal symbol of Pilgrims-and-Indians lies, Thanksgiving was, for a good portion of its history, a symbol of social reform and Northern abolitionism-a day the white slaveholding South held in disdain and refused, for decades, to celebrate. The myth of Thanksgiving isn't just in sanitized denials of white settler-colonial violence and Indigenous genocide. It's also in the fiction that the holiday itself has only recently become " politicized," when it was never apolitical to begin with."
Puritan New England observances and Indigenous feasts both contributed to practices of giving thanks long before a national holiday emerged. A 1789 proclamation by George Washington set an early national precedent, and later presidents issued sporadic thanksgiving days without creating an annual celebration. By the late 1840s some form of harvest thanksgiving existed in many states, with dates varying by governor. As abolitionism strengthened in the North, Thanksgiving acquired sectional and political meaning and became associated with social reform. Southern slaveholding states often rejected the holiday. The holiday's popular myth erases settler-colonial violence and Indigenous harm and obscures its longstanding politicized history.
Read at The Nation
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