Thanksgiving didn’t begin as turkey and pumpkin pie. Long before Europeans arrived, Indigenous nations across North America held ceremonies of gratitude for harvests and the changing seasons. English settlers also brought their own “days of thanksgiving,” usually religious fasts after a good harvest or survival from hardship.

The famous 1621 Plymouth feast with about 50 Pilgrims and 90 Wampanoag sharing corn, venison, and fowl, was really a harvest festival, not called “Thanksgiving.” Later, some colonial “thanksgivings” even marked military victories over Indigenous peoples, complicating the friendly story that became legend.

By the 1800s, Thanksgiving was still irregular, declared locally. That changed when Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, (also famous for writing Mary Had a Little Lamb), campaigned for a national holiday. 

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a yearly observance to promote unity during the Civil War. Congress fixed it on the fourth Thursday of November in 1941.