What Americans Celebrate On Thanksgiving Day

Paul Craig Roberts ■ Americans don’t know what they are celebrating. || In American folklore, Thanksgiving is a holiday that originated in 1621 with the Pilgrims celebrating a good harvest. Some historians say that this event is poorly documented, and others believe that the Thanksgiving tradition travelled to the New World with the Pilgrims and Puritans who brought with them the English Days of Thanksgiving. Other historians think the Pilgrims associated their relief from hunger with their observance of the relief of the siege of Leiden. The Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving, if it happened, might not have been the first in the New World. Historians say the Virginia colonial charter declared a Day of Thanksgiving in 1619, and other historians say the first Thanksgiving was observed by the Spanish in Florida in 1565. Apparently, the different English colonies and later American states each had their own day of Thanksgiving, if they had one. Abraham Lincoln tried to make Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, but the country was divided by the War of Northern Aggression.

Thomas DiLorenzo ■ The New Generation of Holocaust Deniers || Having lied about secession, states’ rights, the origins of the Constitution, Lincoln, and just about everything having to do with the American “Civil War” for many generations, the Lincoln cult is now hard at work on its biggest lie of all: that General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous “march to the sea” did not negatively affect Southern civilians or their property. Sherman was not “gratuitously destructive,” says the marker. He only targeted “military infrastructure.” Of course, in reality Sherman considered every Southern person, every acre of Southern land, every house, every barn, every blade of grass, every farm animal, and even every family pet as part of the Confederacy’s “military infrastructure.” Honest historians have documented this in spades for the past 150 years. It is also documented beyond all doubt by the U.S. government’s own Official Records of the war. Nevertheless, the Lincoln cultists now dismiss the extraordinarily well-documented history of Sherman’s army’s pillaging, plundering, raping, and murdering of Southern civilians as “fables” and mere “family accounts of cruelty.”