Thanksgiving

  • hasRecurrence fourth Thursday in November since 1941
  • "[The first thanksgiving] became a part of popular historical memory not in 1621 but in 1841, the year that Edward Winslow’s account of the Pilgrims’ harvest celebration reentered the historical record. The key figure in the process was the Reverend Alexander Young, a New England-born Unitarian minister with a passion for local history. Working with a copy of Mourt’s Relation discovered in Philadelphia a generation earlier, Young included the text of the pamphlet in a compilation of historical documents he titled Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers."