Happy Thanksgiving, from your friends at Veracity. Wheaton College history professor, Robert Tracy McKenzie, and blogger at “Faith and History,” will get you right about Thanksgiving. Enjoy!
Many of you may be headed to the airport or the interstate for holiday travel, and if so, you might want to pass the time by listening to the podcast of a recent interview that I did with Professor Al Zambone of Augustana College. Zambone maintains a great site called “Historically Thinking” that features conversations with historians on a wide range of topics. Al and I had a lengthy conversation recently about popular memory of the First Thanksgiving, and you can find it here.
Alternatively, you might be interested in a different podcast on Thanksgiving that I did with my old University of Washington colleague, political scientist Anthony Gill, who moderates a wonderful site titled “Research on Religion.” You can access that podcast here.
Both individuals are wonderful scholars and you would find much of value on their sites.
Veracity 
November 26th, 2015 at 8:33 am
Though I enjoyed both podcasts, the second one from “Research on Religion” was my favorite. Here are a few things new I learned that I had never knew or thought about before:
(1) the story of the “First Thanksgiving,” and even the Mayflower contract, were almost lost to history. Much of the story we know about Plymouth Rock did not emerge until the early 19th century. The evidence suggests that the American founding fathers, such as John Adams, probably knew nothing about the Mayflower contract.
(2) As a born and bred Virginia, I already knew that Plymouth Rock was not the site of the “First Thanksgiving” in 1621. It was actually a just few miles near my home in Virginia, near Berkeley Plantation, just a few years earlier. But new research shows that there were other “Thanksgiving” celebrations between early European colonists and their native American neighbors before that:
* the Spanish colony at St. Augustine, Florida (1565), and possibly the French Huguenots there before them (1564),
* Spanish settlement in El Paso, Texas (1598),
* a short lived English colony in Maine (1607).
(3) all history is “revisionist” history. Every historian’s attempt to reconstruct the past is an attempt to get at the “real” history, which implies some “revision.” This is an important lesson for Christians, who get frustrated by the “revisionist” history done by others unsympathetic towards the faith, as well as for Christians themselves when they go back and try to get history “right.”
Happy Thanksgiving.
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