Peter Mancall

speaker

124 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 12 Nov

Peter Mancall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · The Real Story of Thanksgiving - Bonus Holiday Episode · 12 Nov 2025 podcast

I mean, the idea there, it's a campaign to get Lincoln to go along with it, is sort of like we should pause and we should give thanks to God for everything that we have done.

It has nothing really to do in any obvious sense with what happened in early colonial New England, although invariably there were people who are sort of looking back and thinking, well, once upon a time in what was then sort of the myths of the past, there were people and they came and they gave thanks to God and we should do the same thing.

But it's not really the same motivation for a holiday.

That is correct.

I mean, there are people who have studied the history of Thanksgiving, and the official history of Thanksgiving, and it is really our modern holiday as a legal event.

You know, there's a day that there's no mail, a day that there's no school.

I mean, that comes from the 19th century.

You know, it's an interesting question why we celebrate holidays in the ways that we do.

I mean, even if we could imagine a scenario where the people who campaigned for having a holiday to mark this, even if we could imagine a scenario that said,

We should do this because there was a similar event back in the early 1620s.

Even if someone made that the argument for a holiday, there's no reason it would necessarily stick.

I mean, people celebrate holidays for various reasons and they have various meanings to us, and holidays change over time.

It seems to be a holiday as it's come to be celebrated today.

in which we, that is collectively, want to reach back, and they want to reach back to this particular moment in the early 1620s.

They want to reach back to this moment of people getting along.

They want to reach back to a moment of celebration.

By the time Thanksgiving becomes a national holiday, you know, there have been terrible things that happened to Native peoples across what becomes the United States.

And I think in the modern telling of Thanksgiving, a lot of Americans would rather sort of, you know, think about the comforting myth of, wait, we all could get along.

It sort of plays into the way that we think about holidays.

We want to go back to a simple sort of an urtext of the American experience.

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