Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Dinner During The Revolution

The Editors | November 2020

A menu for a 1779 New England Thanksgiving included dishes from turkey and venison to pumpkin pie.

Did MacArthur Ignore a Crucial Signal from the Chinese?

The Readers | December 1999

Why were 20 wounded American soldiers released on Thanksgiving in 1950, days before the Chinese attacked in Korea?

On Thanksgiving Day 1950, two months after General MacArthur’s masterly strategic stroke at Inchon, I was 75 miles south of Manchuria, posted to a battalion-sized 25th Infantry Division Task Force named for its commander, Lt. Col. Weldon G. Dolvin.

The First Thanksgiving, Sort Of

Frederic D. O'Brien | November 1996

Strictly speaking, the high-spirited gathering was a harvest festival, not a thanksgiving.

No Thanks for Thanksgiving

Arthur Nielsen | November 1989

When President Washington proclaimed the first Thanksgiving, the anti-Federalists complained it usurped States’ Rights

The Grimmest Thanksgiving

December 1979

An attempt at modest celebration during the longest battle on German territory during World War II ended badly.

After reading an interview with General Gavin in a newspaper, a major who had fought in the Huertgen Forest wrote the general the following letter:

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.