‘I Was Teaching a Lot of Misconceptions.’
The Way American Kids Are Learning About
the ‘First Thanksgiving’ Is Changing

By Olivia B. Waxman

In an article linked from the one above, Waxman recounts the history of our current Thanksgiving holiday.

She discovered that stories about the Pilgrims and indigenous peoples have very little background information. There was only one source from 1621 consisting of six sentences, and another of the same length from a few years later, written about what happened. Although there was a celebration in 1621, the settlers and Wampanoag were fighting fifty years later, and George Washington’s 1789 call for a day of thanksgiving did not refer to the Plymouth thanksgiving at all. The holiday wasn’t established until 1863 during the Civil War.

Thanksgiving’s depiction for most of the following century was the outcome of two popular books published in the late 1800’s and an illustration in an 1897 edition of Ladies Home Journal. This migrated into teaching materials. “The parts that made the colonists look bad were left out.” These ideas began to change with the civil rights movements in the 1960s and 70s, but these changes have been slow to filter to classrooms, and are now only beginning to be altered.

See more information here.

However, not all of the opposing claims are accurate. One of the links from this article, The Truth About Thanksgiving Is that the Debunkers Are Wrong by Jeremy Bangs, provides research of websites that claim to correct Thanksgiving myths, but which are also incorrect. For instance, many people held some type of thanksgiving before and when the Pilgrims did, but if it had been religious, they would not have celebrated it with others outside of their faith. For that reason, it was probably a harvest festival, and turkey was never mentioned. Another incorrect correction was that “the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony participated in the 1637 Pequot massacre.”

This article lists many other current myths.