Suggested Holiday Resources 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. "American Memory" has a really nice "learning page" section on the celebration of Thanksgiving in America: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/thanks/thanks.php 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.

© The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, 2005. All Rights Reserved.