What Was The First Thanksgiving

Learn more about the history of the feast that started off as a harvest celebration and has now become a national holiday. After their first harvest in 1621, the Pilgrims at Plymouth shared a three-day feast with their Native American neighbors. Of course, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag didn’t know it at the time, but they were making history.

Foreword Book of the Year Award Finalist The Pilgrims' celebration of the first Thanksgiving is a keystone of America's national and spiritual identity. But is what we've been taught about them or their harvest feast what actually happened? And if not, what difference does it make? Through the captivating story of the birth of this quintessentially American holiday, veteran historian Tracy McKenzie helps us to better understand the tale of America's origins—and for Christians, to grasp the significance of this story and those like it. McKenzie avoids both idolizing and demonizing the Pilgrims, and calls us to love and learn from our flawed yet fascinating forebears. The First Thanksgiving is narrative history at its best, and promises to be an indispensable guide to the interplay of historical thinking and Christian reflection on the meaning of the past for the present.

Describes how the first Thanksgiving celebration came to be.

Enjoy this illustrated story of the first Thanksgiving….and then learn to draw it yourself!

Provides an account of America's first real Thanksgiving, celebrated by the Spanish and the native Timucua in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 with a feast that may have included a pork stew, wild turkey, corn, and beans.

Rhyming verses trace the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving Day.

Recreates the first harvest feast celebrated by the Pilgrims in 1621 using the Pilgrim and Indian actors and the seventeenth-century setting of Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts.