Thanksgiving
The Biography of an American Holiday
James W. Baker
University of New Hampshire Press, 2009
It was not practical to include many of the Thanksgiving images mentioned in the text, and as they all had to be black and white, the effect of the original color is lost. In this collection, you can see some of these.
From Chapter 1 - the first outdoor feast scene representing the 1621 "First Thanksgiving", by W. L. Taylor, illustrating Clifford Harper's article in the Ladies Home Journal (1897) (Figure 4):
From Chapter 6 "Enter The Pilgrims" (Figure 21) early representation of the 1621 Plymouth feast, Harper's Weekly, 1870:
From Chapter 6: Three images of the violence motif that preceeded the modern representation of a peaceful meeting between Pilgrims and Indians:
From Chapter 7 "Pilgrims are for Kids", the impression of the anxiety of "Old Americans" over contemporary immigrants as opposed to the virtuous Pilgrims, which spoke to their desire to Americanize both children and immigrants in the importance of the early colonists as role models (from Life, 1887):
From Chapter 8 "Imaging the Holiday" (Figure 32-Decorations):
(Figure 29, postcards. Note the single representation of the "First Thanksgiving" found, last picture)
(Figure 30, the importance of black Thanksgiving imagery)
