“Did you know?”: Thanksgiving edition

Though modern Americans might find the notion of a turkey-free Thanksgiving hard to fathom, the idea of eating the now popular fowl did not become synonymous with the holiday until the mid-nineteenth century. According to History.com, President George Washington declared a day of national thanksgiving in 1789, but decades passed before turkey came to be presented as a staple of Thanksgiving celebrations. History.com notes that novelist Sarah Joseph Hale offered a lengthy description of Thanksgiving celebrations in New England in her 1827 novel, Northwood. Hale eventually drew on the writings of William Bradford, who served as Governor of the Plymouth Colony from 1621 to 1657. Bradford’s history of the colony noted the abundance of turkeys around the time of the first Thanksgiving meal, and Hale ultimately drew on Bradford’s recollection and incorporated turkey into her depictions of Thanksgiving meals after expending much energy promoting the idea of a national Thanksgiving holiday throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century.