Overview

Thanksgiving is often remembered as a simple story of gratitude, unity, and shared beginnings. Yet beneath the familiar images of harvest tables, smiling Pilgrims, and symbolic harmony lies a far more complex history-one shaped by survival, power, mythmaking, and selective memory. Unknown Facts About Thanksgiving looks beyond the comforting narrative to examine how this holiday was constructed, why it endured, and what it continues to conceal. Rather than retelling the familiar story, this book traces Thanksgiving's evolution from a fragile colonial encounter into a national ritual that shaped American identity. It explores how a single, irregular meal became a moral origin story; how religious language transformed survival into divine approval; how violence, displacement, and Indigenous trauma were written out of public memory; and how gratitude itself became a social expectation rather than a voluntary feeling. Moving through history, culture, psychology, education, and economics, the book reveals Thanksgiving not as a timeless tradition but as a carefully maintained system-one that offers comfort, unity, and reassurance precisely by avoiding accountability. From school textbooks and parades to football, commercial excess, and national healing narratives, Thanksgiving emerges as a holiday that does important emotional work while quietly limiting deeper reckoning. Written in a clear, analytical, and accessible style, Unknown Facts About Thanksgiving does not seek to cancel the holiday or replace gratitude with guilt. Instead, it asks a more challenging question: what does Thanksgiving allow us to avoid, and why has that avoidance felt necessary for so long? This is a book for readers who enjoy history without illusion, cultural analysis without cynicism, and thoughtful questioning of traditions we think we already understand. It invites readers to reconsider Thanksgiving-not to abandon it, but to see it clearly.

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