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By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor– and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be– That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks–for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation–for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war–for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed–for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted–for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions– to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually–to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed–to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord–To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us–and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go: Washington



Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/27/george-washingtons-thanksgiving-proc
lamation/#ixzz2ltRDPG8Q

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Complete hogwash, as any true historian will attest. But thanks to listening to an entertainer for your history lessons! I'm sure you will be well-informed!

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Complete hogwash, as any true historian will attest. But thanks to listening to an entertainer for your history lessons! I'm sure you will be well-informed!

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The idea of the American Thanksgiving feast is a fairly recent fiction. The idyllic partnership of 17th Century European Pilgrims and New England Indians sharing a celebratory meal appears to be less than 120 years-old. And it was only after the First World War that a version of such a Puritan-Indian partnership took hold in elementary schools across the American landscape. We can thank the invention of textbooks and their mass purchase by public schools for embedding this "Thanksgiving" image in our modern minds. It was, of course, a complete invention, a cleverly created slice of cultural propaganda, just another in a long line of inspired nationalistic myths.

The first Thanksgiving Day did occur in the year 1637, but it was nothing like our Thanksgiving today. On that day the Massachusetts Colony Governor, John Winthrop, proclaimed such a "Thanksgiving" to celebrate the safe return of a band of heavily armed hunters, all colonial volunteers. They had just returned from their journey to what is now Mystic, Connecticut where they massacred 700 Pequot Indians. Seven hundred Indians - men, women and children - all murdered.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Rappy, please... vet your stories! Don't just take whatever is given to you by Rush as gospel bc it reinforces your beliefs. Don't pull a Lara Logan on us, again!

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Rappy, please... vet your stories! Don't just take whatever is given to you by Rush as gospel bc it reinforces your beliefs. Don't pull a Lara Logan on us, again!

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Basically, the denials have been "Not true! Not true ! " .

Rush does paint an accurate picture,of the Pilgrims arriving to a wild frontier, no homes with hearty fires or stores of food. These guys showed up in August ? Doesn't leave much time to build suitable shelter or go food gathering , before the winter. Especially for bunch of green horns. And they paid for it, too, with all the lives lost.

And yet they came,and survived. Truly remarkable.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

I'm just a red pill guy in a room full of blue pill addicts.

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Originally posted by ElvisChrist:

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

I'm just a red pill guy in a room full of blue pill addicts.

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Maybe your pill addiction is part of the problem.

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What Americans think they know about the history of Thanksgiving doesn’t always square with the truth.

For example, it is generally believed that in 1621, the Pilgrims invited Wampanoag Indians to a feast in Plymouth Colony to celebrate their first harvest, and a good time, with turkey and pumpkin pie, was had by all. Well, maybe, and maybe not.

Historians, including those at Plimoth Plantation, a living museum in Plymouth, Mass., say that they do know there was a feast that year shared by the colonists and Wampanoag Indians, and Squanto, who had learned English, served as translator. But the one historical account of the actual dinner says venison was served and some sort of fowl, but it doesn’t specifically mention turkey. Pumpkin was available, but it is not likely the colonists whipped up a pie. Furthermore, sweet potatoes were unknown to the colonists, and cranberries may have been served but not as a relish.

There’s a lot of misinformation about the Pilgrims, too. American kids learn that the Pilgrims came to the New World in search of religious freedom, and they dressed only in black and white, and wore buckles on their shoes. No, no, and no.

The Pilgrims left Britain in search of religious freedom, but found it in Holland in the early 1600s, where they found a high degree of religious tolerance. The reason they wanted to come to the New World and establish a colony was to preserve their English identity and for economic reasons. Also, they didn’t wear buckles on their shoes, and Pilgrim women dressed in colors, including red, green, blue and violet, while men wore a variety of colors, too.

If you think Americans have been celebrating Thanksgiving annually since 1621, guess again. Nobody at the time thought of it as the start of a new tradition, and there had been similar gatherings elsewhere earlier. Historians know there was another feast in the colony in 1623 — but it was held earlier in the year. Different colonies celebrated their own days of thanksgiving during the year.

In 1789, George Washington declared Thursday, Nov. 26, a Thanksgiving holiday, but only for that year, and it wasn’t connected to the Pilgrim feast but rather intended as a “public thanksgiving and prayer” devoted to “the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”

Enter a 19th-century author, poet and magazine editor named Sarah Josepha Hale. She was editor of the influential Godey’s Lady’s Book for 40 years, from 1837 to 1877, when she was nearly 90 years old. She and her husband David Hale had five children, and when he died in 1822, she wore black for the rest of her life. Hale was an education advocate and, through the magazine she edited, became a famous figure in the country who set fashion, reading and cooking trends. Washington Irving Jr., Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes were among the authors who published work in her magazine. She was also a prolific author, writing dozens of novels and books of poetry, and penned (or co-penned, according to one account) the famous “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which was published in 1830.

Hale, who was highly patriotic, read about the 1621 feast of the Pilgrims and became captivated with the idea of turning it into a national holiday. She published in the Godey’s Lady’s Book recipes for turkey and stuffing and pumpkin pie and started traditions that had nothing to do with the colonists. She began a lobbying campaign to persuade President Abraham Lincoln to make Thanksgiving an official annual holiday, using her magazine to build public support by writing an editorial every year starting in 1846. She also sent letters to all governors in the United States and territories. In 1863, Lincoln did set Thanksgiving as an official holiday to be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November every year.

In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to move the annual Thanksgiving holiday to the third Thursday of November. Why? To help the economy by making the Christmas shopping season a little bit longer. There was so much opposition to the move that two years later he changed it to the fourth Thursday in November.

Then there’s the myth of how the presidential pardon of a turkey started with Abraham Lincoln when his son begged his dad to save the animal. Actually, it didn’t. The tradition goes all the way back in history to … 1989, when President George H.W. Bush officially pardoned the first one. According to a perhaps apocryphal story, in 1863, Lincoln’s 10-year-old son, Tad, supposedly became fond of a turkey given to the family for a holiday feast. Tad named the turkey Jack and begged his father to save the animal. Lincoln did. The only problem with that as a Thanksgiving story is that Tad’s plea was to save the Christmas turkey!

And, finally, you may hear people say that turkey makes them tired. No, it doesn’t. Turkey contains tryptophan, an essential amino acid that is thought to have a sedative effect. As it turns out, turkey doesn’t have any more tryptophan than other foods, including chicken, and even if tryptophan did induce tiredness, there isn’t enough in turkey to do so. So if you are tired after eating Thanksgiving dinner, don’t blame the turkey.

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I have a special fondness for Thanksgiving because, apart from anything else, when I was growing up it was the one time of year we ate in our house. All the other days of the year we just kind of put food into our mouths. My mother was not a great cook, you see.

Now please don't misunderstand me. My mother is a kindly, cheerful, saintly soul, and when she dies she will go straight to heaven, but believe me, no one is going to say, "Oh, thank goodness you're here, Mrs Bryson, can you fix us something to eat?"

To be perfectly fair to her, my mother had several strikes against her in the kitchen department. To begin with, she couldn't cook - always a bit of a handicap where the culinary arts are concerned. Mind you, she didn't especially want to be able to cook, and anyway she couldn't have even if she had wanted to. She had a career, you see, which meant that she was always flying in the door two minutes before it was time to put dinner on the table. On top of this, she was a trifle absent-minded. She tended to confuse similarly coloured ingredients like sugar and salt, pepper and cinnamon, vinegar and maple syrup, cornflour and plaster of Paris, which often lent her dishes an unexpected dimension. Her particular speciality was to cook things while they were still in the packaging. I was almost full-grown before I realised that clingfilm wasn't a sort of chewy glaze. A combination of haste, forgetfulness and a charming incompetence where household appliances were concerned meant that most of her cooking experiences were punctuated with billows of smoke and occasional small explosions. In our house, as a rule of thumb, it was time to eat when the firemen departed.

Strangely, this suited my father. My father had what you might call rudimentary tastes in food. His palate really only responded to three flavours: salt, ketchup and burnt. His idea of an outstanding meal was a plate that contained something brown and unidentifiable, something green and unidentifiable, and something charred. I am quite sure that if you slow-baked, say, a loofah and covered it sufficiently with ketchup, he would have said, "Hey, this is very tasty." Good food, in short, was something that was wasted on him, and my mother worked hard for years to see that he was never disappointed.

But on Thanksgiving, by some kind of miracle, she pulled out all the stops and outdid herself. She would call us to the table and there we would find, awaiting our unaccustomed delectation, a sumptuous spread of food - an enormous and glistening turkey, baskets of cornbread and warm rolls, vegetables that you could actually recognise, a tureen of cranberry sauce, a bowl of exquisitely fluffed mashed potatoes, a salver of plump sausages, and much else. We would eat as if we had not eaten for a year (as, in effect, we had not) and then she would present the piece de resistance - a golden, flaky-crusted pumpkin pie surrounded by a Matterhorn of whipped cream. It was perfect. It was heaven.

And it has left me with the profoundest joy and gratitude for this most wonderful of holidays - for Thanksgiving is the most splendid of occasions, and make no mistake.

Most Americans, I believe, think that Thanksgiving has always been held on the last Thursday of November and that it has been going on for ever, or at least as near for ever as anything gets in America.

In fact, although the Mayflower pilgrims did indeed hold a famous feast in 1621 to thank the local Indians for their help in getting them through their first difficult year and showing them how to make popcorn and so on (for which I am grateful even yet), there is no record of when that feast was held. Given the climate of New England, it was unlikely to have been late November. In any case, for the next 242 years Thanksgiving as an event was hardly noted. The first official celebration wasn't held until 1863 - and then in August, of all months. The next year President Abraham Lincoln moved it arbitrarily to the last Thursday in November - no one seems to recall now why a Thursday, or why so late in the year, and there it has stayed ever since.

Thanksgiving is wonderful, and for all kinds of reasons. To begin with, it has the commendable effect of staving off Christmas. Whereas in Britain the Christmas shopping season seems nowadays to kick off round about the August bank holiday, Christmas mania doesn't traditionally begin in America until the last weekend in November.

Moreover, Thanksgiving remains a pure holiday, largely unsullied by commercialisation. It involves no greetings cards, no trees to trim, no perplexed hunt through drawers and cupboards for decorations. At Thanksgiving all you do is sit at a table and try to get your stomach into the shape of a beach ball, and then go and watch a game of American football on the TV. This is my kind of holiday. But perhaps the nicest, and certainly the noblest, aspect of Thanksgiving is that it gives you a formal, official occasion to give thanks for all those things for which you should be grateful. Speaking personally, I have a great deal to be thankful for. I have a wife and children I am crazy about. I have my health and retain full command of most of my faculties (albeit not always simultaneously). I live in a time of peace and prosperity, Ronald Reagan will never be president again. These are things for which I am grateful, and I am pleased to let the record show it.

The only downside is that the passage of Thanksgiving marks the inescapable onset of Christmas. Any day now - any moment - my dear wife will appear beside me and announce that the time has come to shift my distended stomach and get out the festive decorations. This is a dread moment for me and with good reason, since it involves physical exertion, wobbly ladders, live electricity, wriggling ascents through a loft hatch, and the collaborative direction of said dear missus - all things with the power to do me a serious and permanent injury. I have a terrible feeling that today may be that day. Still, it hasn't happened yet and for that, of course, I give my sincerest thanks of all.

Extracted from `Notes from a Big Country' by Bill Bryson, published by Doubleday, price pounds 16.99. Available at all major bookshops or by mail order on 01624 675137

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