My idea for a book about Thanksgiving was born in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I was in downtown Manhattan that awful morning on my way to my office at the Wall Street Journal, directly across from the World Trade Center. I stood on the street and watched the towers fall. Two months later, as Thanksgiving approached, I found myself reading William Bradford’s first-person account of the First Thanksgiving. I wanted to learn more about this little kernel of history and how it grew into a cherished national holiday. I wrote several articles for the Journal about the holiday. Writing a book was the logical next step.
I wrote
Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience
Of Plymouth Plantation is Governor William Bradford’s first-person account of the Pilgrims’ journey to America and the adventures, trials, and tribulations they encountered there. It’s a monumental story, and Bradford’s telling of it is thrilling. Only 53 Pilgrims survived their first winter in the New World, half the number of men, women, and children who had sailed on the Mayflower. But now, Bradford writes, everyone was “well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty.” That included “a great store of wild turkeys” and much more. Does that sound familiar? Happy Thanksgiving.
In honor of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower's landing at Plymouth in 1620, a new edition of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation -- a first person narrative account of the pilgrims' adventures, challenges, and triumphs during their early years in America. This edition is derived from the 1890 abridged version published by Effingham, Maynard & Co., which has been further lightly edited to make it more accessible to students and the modern reader. This edition also includes a brief account of the life of William Bradford from that edition.
William Bradford (1590 – 1657) originally hailed from Yorkshire in…
I love, love, love this endearing novella by the author of Little Women. It’s Thanksgiving morning on the Barrett Farm in New Hampshire, and Mrs. Barrett is called away to nurse her sick mother in town. Father hitches up the sleigh and off they go to Grandma’s house, leaving eight hungry children behind. The oldest girl declares that she knows how to roast a turkey, and before you know it, she’s talked her skeptical brothers and sisters into helping her make the feast. Catastrophe ensues, with a lot of fun for the reader along the way.
"You will see what I can do. Ma said I was to use my judgment about things, and I'm going to. All you children have got to do is to keep out of the way, and let Prue and me work. Eph, I wish you'd put a fire in the best room, so the little ones can play in there. We shall want the settin-room for the table, and I won't have them pickin' round when we get things fixed," commanded Tilly, bound to make her short reign a brilliant one.
If you’re nervous about fixing Thanksgiving dinner—and who isn’t?—this book is for you. Veteran cooking teacher Rick Rodgers provides an array of excellent holiday recipes along with a step-by-step guide to preparing, cooking, and serving the meal. While his focus is the traditional feast—turkey, stuffing, cranberries, potatoes, pies—he also includes recipes for ethnic and vegetarian favorites. Plus there’s a welcome section on what to do with the leftovers. When it comes to preparing the holiday dinner, my personal Mount Everest has always been the gravy. No longer. Thanks to Thanksgiving 101, my gravy is now rich, smooth, and delicious.
Every fourth Thursday of November, Americans open their homes to friends and families. But when was the last time most of us made dinner for such a big crowd? With Thanksgiving 101 by your side, preparing for the holiday will be a pleasure. With step-by-step instructions for classic Thanksgiving dishes, as well as new twists on old favorites, this book will become gravy-stained in its first outing. Whether you're looking for new ways to cook turkey; traditional trimmings, chutneys, or chowders; a vegetarian entrée; or fresh ideas for regional classics, including Cajun-or Italian-inspired tastes, Thanksgiving 101 serves up a delicious…
There is no better book on Thanksgiving for young children than Phyllis Alsdurf’s Thanksgiving in the Woods, which recounts the true story of the annual holiday dinner that a group of family and friends celebrate in the woods of upstate New York. Gorgeous illustrations by Jenny Lovlie evoke the famous First Thanksgiving of 1621, when Pilgrims and Indians enjoyed a three-day harvest feast in the woods of New England. Four hundred years later, the meaning of the holiday remains the same. As Thanksgiving in the Woods explains, Thanksgiving is about faith, family, and friends.
Every year a family and their friends gather in the woods to celebrate Thanksgiving among the trees. Everyone brings something to share and the day becomes a long celebration of family, faith, and friendship. Told in a gentle, lyrical style, this picture book includes warm illustrations of people gathered around bonfires and long tables adorned with candles and food, singing songs and sharing laughter.
Thanksgiving in the Woods is based on the true story of a family in Upstate New York who has hosted an outdoor Thanksgiving feast in the woods on their farm for over twenty years.
To understand the derivation of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner, look no further than American Cookery, the first cookbook written by an American to be published in the United States. The word “Thanksgiving” doesn’t appear in American Cookery, which came out in 1796. But recipes for the familiar holiday meal are all here: roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, cornbread, and potatoes—and, of course, mince pie and pumpkin pie. American Cookery was the first time that most of these recipes appeared in print. So, too, Simmons was the first culinary writer to focus on New World foods, that is, ingredients that would be easily available to most American cooks. It's no surprise that American Cookery is on the Library of Congress’s list of “Books That Shaped America.”
Amelia Simmons worked as a domestic in Colonial America and gathered her cookery expertise from firsthand experience. Her book points out the best ways of judging the quality of meats, poultry, fish, vegetables, etc., and presents the best methods of preparing and cooking them. In choosing fish, poultry, and other meats, the author wisely advises, "their smell denotes their goodness." Her sound suggestions for choosing the freshest and most tender onions, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, asparagus, lettuce, cabbage, beans, and other vegetables are as timely today as they were nearly 200 years ago. Here are the first uniquely American recipes using…
We all know the story of Thanksgiving. Or do we? Drawing on newspaper accounts, private correspondence, historical documents, and cookbooks, I explore the little-known history of the holiday—including the role of Presidents Washington, Lincoln and FDR; the “first” Thanksgivings in Florida, Virginia and Texas; and, of course, why we eat turkey and watch football on the fourth Thursday of November. I thank Katherine Messenger for enhancing my words with her lovely illustrations.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
