Happy Thanksgiving from the MVCC Library faculty and staff. We hope you are sharing the holiday with friends and family.
For your enjoyment, here is a link to a piece from the podcast Backstory, which discusses the history of Thanksgiving. Like most things, the myth does not quite match the actual history.
Listen: American as Pumpkin Pie: A History of Thanksgiving
When we sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, we think we know what we’re commemorating. But if an actual Pilgrim were to attend your Thanksgiving, chances are he’d be stunned by what he saw there. In this episode, historian James McWilliams discusses why the Puritans would have turned up their noses at our “traditional” Thanksgiving foods. Religion scholar Anne Blue Wills reveals the Victorian origins of our modern holiday, and one woman’s campaign to fix it on the national calendar. An archeologist at Colonial Williamsburg explains what garbage has to tell us about early American diets. And legendary NFL quarterback Roger Staubach describes what it was like to spend every turkey day on the football field.