Vol. 32, No. 22

November 21, 2016

The Meaning of Thanksgiving

Steve Byas

On the fourth Thursday of each November, millions of Americans gather around the dinner table to eat turkey and dressing, and stuff themselves with all kinds of foods, in the great American holiday known as Thanksgiving. The story of the holiday’s origins reveals much of what made this country at its founding.

While the first shots of the American Revolution are said to have been fired in 1775, John Adams remarked that the revolution was already “complete” in the minds of the colonists. He meant that the embattled farmers stood on the village green at Lexington and at Concord’s Old North Bridge, not to change their way of life, but to preserve it.

The Thanksgiving celebration is an important part of that revolution, in which a new way of life developed on the shores of English America.

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