John writes:

> To find out about the "real" first Thanksgiving (and other "events" in
>  American history) I strongly recommend a book by James Loewen called "Lies
>  my Teacher Told Me" - see http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/
>
>  There is a transcript of a broadcast interview with James Loewen at
>  http://www.booknotes.org/transcripts/50039.htm which makes interesting
>  reading and contains various information that is expanded upon in his
>  book.  Here is one paragraph from that (long) interview:
>
>  "The first point to know about Thanksgiving is that it was actually
invented
> by Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War, and the first
> Thanksgiving that is in our modern series happened in 1863, and it was
> basically giving thanks for the slow victory of the troops, particularly
> that previous summer in Vicksburg and at Gettysburg and the fact
> that the Union was going to be held together and that
> slavery was going to be ended."

John's absolutely correct, but the story is even a bit more complicated than
that. I wrote the following privately to another list member concerning the
religious nature of Thanksgiving:

"Thanksgiving is an American political holiday dressed up in religious garb,
but the purposes it serves are far more political than merely religious.
Although days of Thanksgiving were celebrated for several years following the
American Revolution, in thanks (and the fervent hope) for the continued
success of the new nation, Thanksgiving was inaugurated as national tradition
much later during Lincoln's administration, as a curious admixture of two
completely different ideas: "the cult of domesticity" and the horror of the
American Civil War.

"In the several decades just prior to the Civil War, the "cult of
domesticity" grew to the point that it finally gathered a substantial
following. This movement was the first true feminist movement in the US, an
attempt to solidify and legitimize the sanctity of marriage, placing a man as
head of household, but most especially pinning him with responsibilities
towards the children he fathered. The underlying intent of the movement was
to provide for economic stability and security of young mothers and their
children, with the best way seen to accomplish that as stigmatizing the
"dead-beat dads" that abandoned their children. The leader of this movement,
name momentarily forgotten, was also the primary advocate of the idea of a
national holiday, Thanksgiving, to celebrate the virtues of home life.

"The second convening event was, of course, the Civil War. National Days of
Thanksgiving were regularly scheduled on both sides following each major
victory, and occurred several times each year for the first several years of
the war. Lincoln however gave the extraordinary tragedy of the Civil War
meaning, a higher moral calling, with the Emancipation Proclamation. Without
this proclamation, the war would have been nothing more than a waste of human
life (60,000 dead in one day at Gettysburg, more than the entire losses in
either the Viet Nam or Korean wars; a battlefield so littered with dead that
you could walk five miles on the backs of dead men and never need touch the
ground). In that same vein as the Emancipation Proclamation and the
Gettysburg Address, attempting to hold a nation together by imbuing a moral
reason on such madness, Lincoln established a national day of Thanksgiving in
1863, at least for the northern states, in late November. However, the idea
was not new. Rather it was essentially co-opted to serve a new national
purpose. Because of the "cult of domesticity," the idea had been in the air
for several decades prior to the War."

After I wrote the above from memory, I took the time to check my facts :-).
There are several errors:

    o The Battle of Gettysburg lasted three days, not one as I said.

    o The estimates of number of dead range from 51,000 to 57,000,
       counting both Union and Confederate dead, not 60,000.

     o The editor of Godey's Ladies' Book, Sarah Josepha Hale, was
        the person unremembered. Not only was she a leader in the
        "cult of domesticity" movement, she faithfully wrote every
        president from 1846 to 1863 to establish a national day of
        Thanksgiving.

     o Some would say that I overemphasized the role of the Cult of
        Domesticity in solidifying male responsibilities for their children.
        That isn't the emphasis of most of the web pages that I found,
        but that was the impression I got from my readings on the
        subject 30 years ago.

The "Cult of Domesticity", up until the rise of the internet, was always just
a footnote in American history classes, but I was very pleasantly surprised
to find the wealth of information on the subject now on the web. I still
think that there may be some use for this thing yet.

Wirt Atmar