Nine in 10 Americans<\/a> gather around a table to share food on Thanksgiving. At this polarizing moment, anything that promises to bring Americans together warrants our attention.<\/p>\n But as a historian of religion<\/a>, I feel obliged to recount how popular interpretations of Thanksgiving also have pulled us apart.<\/p>\n Communal rituals of giving thanks have a longer history<\/a> in North America, and it was only around the turn of the 20th century that most people in the U.S. came to associate Thanksgiving with Plymouth \u201cPilgrims\u201d and generic \u201cIndians\u201d sharing a historic meal.<\/p>\n READ MORE:<\/strong> Native American tribes arrive in Plymouth to mourn on Thanksgiving<\/a><\/p>\n The emphasis on the Pilgrims\u2019 1620 landing<\/a> and 1621 feast erased a great deal of religious history and narrowed conceptions of who belongs in America \u2013 at times excluding groups such as Native Americans, Catholics and Jews.<\/p>\n The usual Thanksgiving depiction overlooks Indigenous rituals that give thanks, including harvest festivals.<\/p>\n The Wampanoag<\/a>, who shared food with the Pilgrims in 1621, continue to celebrate the cranberry harvest<\/a>, and similar feasts were held long before Columbus sailed and Pilgrims landed.<\/p>\n READ MORE:<\/strong> The botany behind why cranberries became a Thanksgiving staple<\/a><\/p>\n As I note in my 2025 book, \u201cReligion in the Lands That Became America<\/a>,\u201d for instance, celebrants gathered for a communal feast<\/a> in the late 11th century in the 50-acre plaza of Cahokia. That Native city<\/a>, across the river from present-day St. Louis, was the largest population center north of Mexico before the American Revolution.<\/p>\n Cahokians and their neighbors came in late summer or early autumn<\/a> to give deities thanks, smoke ritual tobacco and eat special food \u2013 not corn, their dietary staple, but symbolically significant animals such as white swans and white-tailed deer. So, those Cahokians attended a thanks-giving feast five centuries before the Pilgrims\u2019 harvest-time meal.<\/p>\n The usual depiction also de-emphasizes the tradition of officials announcing special \u201cDays of Thanksgiving,\u201d a practice familiar to the Pilgrims and their descendants.<\/p>\n The Pilgrims, who settled in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, were separatist Puritans who had denounced the Catholic elements<\/a> that remained in the Protestant Church of England. They first sought to form their own \u201cpurified\u201d church and community in Holland<\/a>. After about 12 years, many of them moved again, crossing the Atlantic in 1620. The Pilgrims\u2019 colony southeast of Boston was gradually absorbed into Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630 by a larger group of Puritans who did not split from England\u2019s official church.<\/p>\n As historians have noted<\/a>, Puritan ministers in Massachusetts\u2019 state-sanctioned Congregational Church didn\u2019t just speak on Sundays. Now and then they also gave special thanksgiving sermons, which expressed gratitude for what the community considered divine interventions, from military victory to epidemic relief.<\/p>\n The practice continued and spread. During the American Revolution, for instance, the Continental Congress declared a Day of Thanksgiving<\/a> to commemorate the victory at Saratoga in 1777. President James Madison announced Days of Thanksgiving<\/a> during the War of 1812. Leaders of the United States and the Confederate states did the same<\/a> during the Civil War.<\/p>\n This tradition influenced Americans such as Sarah Hale<\/a>, who called for a national Thanksgiving holiday. A magazine editor and poet best known for \u201cMary Had a Little Lamb<\/a>,\u201d she successfully pitched the idea to Abraham Lincoln in 1863.<\/p>\n Many Americans\u2019 view of \u201cThe First Thanksgiving\u201d resembles the scene depicted in a Jean Ferris painting<\/a> by that name. Finished around 1915, it is similar to another popular image<\/a> painted around the same time, Jennie Augusta Brownscombe\u2019s \u201cThe First Thanksgiving at Plymouth.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe First Thanksgiving at Plymouth\u201d by Jennie A. Brownscombe. Both images distort the historical context and misrepresent Indigenous attendees from the nearby Wampanoag Confederacy. The Native leaders wear headdresses from Plains tribes, and there are too few Indigenous attendees.<\/p>\n Only one eyewitness account<\/a> survives: a 1621 letter from the Pilgrim Edward Winslow<\/a>. He reported that the Wampanoag\u2019s leader, Massasoit, brought 90 men. That means, some historians suggest<\/a>, the shared meal was as much a diplomatic event marking an alliance as an agricultural feast celebrating a harvest.<\/p>\n READ MORE:<\/strong> Thanksgiving lessons jettison Pilgrim hats, welcome truth<\/a><\/p>\n Ferris\u2019 painting also implies that the English provided the food. Plymouth residents brought \u201cfowl,\u201d as Winslow recalled<\/a> \u2013 probably wild turkey \u2013 but the Wampanoag added five killed deer. Even the harvest of \u201cIndian corn\u201d depended on Native aid. Tisquantum or Squanto, the lone survivor<\/a> of the village that the Pilgrims called Plymouth, had offered lifesaving advice about planting as well as diplomacy.<\/p>\n The image\u2019s cheerful scene also obscures how death had destabilized the area. The Pilgrims lost almost half their group to famine or exposure that first winter. After earlier European contact, however, even larger numbers of the Wampanoag had died in a regional epidemic<\/a> that raged between 1616-1619. That\u2019s why the Pilgrims found Squanto\u2019s village abandoned, and why both communities were open to the alliance he brokered.<\/p>\n The Pilgrims were latecomers to the Thanksgiving table. Lincoln\u2019s 1863 proclamation<\/a>, published in Harper\u2019s Monthly, mentioned \u201cthe blessing of fruitful fields,\u201d but not the Pilgrims. Nor were Pilgrims depicted in the magazine\u2019s illustrated follow-up<\/a>. The page showed town and country, as well as emancipated slaves, celebrating the feast day by praying at \u201cthe Union altar.\u201d For years before and after the proclamation, in fact, many Southerners resisted Thanksgiving<\/a>, which they saw as a Northern, abolitionist holiday.<\/p>\n The Pilgrims\u2019 absence makes sense, since they were not the first Europeans to land on North America\u2019s eastern coast \u2013 or to give thanks there. Spanish Catholics had founded St. Augustine<\/a> in 1565. According to an eyewitness account<\/a>, the Spanish leader asked a priest to celebrate Mass<\/a> on Sept. 8, 1565, which Native Americans attended<\/a>, and \u201cordered that the Indians be fed.\u201d<\/p>\n Two decades later, an English group had tried and failed to establish a colony on Roanoke Island, North Carolina \u2013 including a Jewish engineer<\/a>. The English had more success when they settled Jamestown, Virginia<\/a>, in 1607. A commander leading a new group to Virginia was instructed to mark \u201ca day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God<\/a>\u201d in 1619, two years before the Plymouth meal.<\/p>\n But over the years, Plymouth\u2019s Pilgrims still moved slowly toward the center of the national holiday<\/a> \u2013 and America\u2019s founding narrative.<\/p>\n In 1769, Plymouth residents promoted their town by organizing a \u201cForefathers\u2019 Day.\u201d In 1820 the Protestant politician Daniel Webster gave a speech<\/a> commemorating the bicentennial of the landing at Plymouth Rock and praising the Pilgrims\u2019 arrival as \u201cthe first footsteps of civilized man\u201d in the wilderness. Then in an 1841 volume, \u201cChronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers<\/a>,\u201d a Boston minister reprinted the 1621 eyewitness account and described the shared harvest meal as \u201cthe first Thanksgiving.\u201d<\/p>\n Between 1880 and 1920, the Pilgrims emerged as the central characters in national narratives about both Thanksgiving Day and America\u2019s origin. It was no coincidence that these years were the peak of immigration to the U.S.<\/a>, and many Americans saw the new immigrants as inferior to those who had landed at Plymouth Rock.<\/p>\n A late-1800s depiction of the Plymouth landing, published by the printmaking business Currier and Ives. Irish Catholics already had a presence in Boston<\/a> when the \u201cPilgrim Fathers\u201d volume appeared in 1841, and more came after the Irish potato famine later that decade. Boston\u2019s foreign-born population increased further<\/a> as poverty and politics pushed Italian Catholics and Russian Jews to seek a better life in America.<\/p>\n The same was happening in many northern cities, and some Protestants were alarmed. In an 1885 bestseller called \u201cOur Country<\/a>,\u201d a Congregational Church minister warned that \u201cthe glory is departing from many a New England village, because men, alien in blood, in religion, and in civilization, are taking possession of homes in which were once reared the descendants of the Pilgrims.\u201d<\/p>\n During the 300th anniversary<\/a> of the Pilgrims\u2019 landing and harvest meal, celebrated in 1920 and 1921, the federal government issued commemorative stamps<\/a> and coins<\/a>. Officials staged pageants<\/a>, and politicians gave speeches. About 30,000 people gathered in Plymouth, for instance, to hear President Warren Harding<\/a> and Vice President Calvin Coolidge praise the \u201cPilgrim Spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n Soon nativist worries about the newcomers, especially Catholics and Jews, led Coolidge to sign the Immigration Act of 1924<\/a>, which would largely close America\u2019s borders for four decades.<\/p>\n Americans kept telling the Pilgrim story after U.S. immigration policy became more welcoming in 1965<\/a>, and many will tell it again next year as we celebrate the nation\u2019s 250th anniversary<\/a>. Understood in its full context, it\u2019s a story worth telling. But we might use caution since, as history reminds us, stories about the country\u2019s spiritual past can either bring us together or pull us apart.<\/p>\n This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n A free press is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. <\/p>\n \n Support trusted journalism and civil dialogue.\n <\/p>\nFarming faiths and harvest festivals<\/h2>\n
\u2018Days of Thanksgiving\u2019<\/h2>\n
Harvest feast of 1621<\/h2>\n
Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal\/Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/div>\nPilgrims\u2019 primacy<\/h2>\n
Rising immigration<\/h2>\n
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Mabel Brady Garvan Collection\/Yale University Art Gallery<\/p>\n<\/div>\n