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Apart from the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving is the most quintessentially American holiday celebrated in the United States. What it lacks in the muscular patriotism of Independence Day it makes up for in its allowance for an assortment of traditions, with different geographic regions and demographic groups celebrating Thanksgiving in their own way.

How Thanksgiving Reflects America’s Complex Identity

Fractious in aggregate, it is often also fractious in microcosm, as families come together only to find themselves arguing about politics and sports and culture. That fractiousness is core to the American project, which is why Americans at home and abroad derive so much joy from Thanksgiving.

Like all countries the United States has national myths, some of which rise organically and some of which are carefully constructed. Such national myths are no less influential for often being complete bunk. Thanksgiving is not quite uniquely American; Canadians also celebrate, although earlier in the year. Much like July 4, however, Thanksgiving is a New World holiday, where Old World rituals have either dropped away or mutated to unrecognizable extent. 

Thanksgiving events were held in the America’s from the earliest years of English colonization, and the tradition our modern Thanksgiving emerged from was more than anything else a New England harvest festival that slowly expanded across the United States during the 19th century. The myth became core to our understanding of the founding of the country and of the common experience of colonialism that the disparate territories shared.

It also tended to locate our national origin in New England, only one and not necessarily the best of several potential candidates. The Early Republic saw a variety of different “thanksgiving” themed declarations and holidays, but the Thanksgiving we know today gained momentum in mid-century and was established permanently only in 1863, proclaimed by President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War. 

As with all national myths and as its Civil War origins imply, Thanksgiving has its demographic dissidents and its discontents. For obvious reasons the celebration of Thanksgiving is deeply complex in Native American communities, treated by some as a Day of Mourning. In the years after the Civil War Thanksgiving was not widely celebrated in the South, as the holiday seemed representative of the North’s arrogance in victory. Over time, however, the South embraced Thanksgiving as vigorously as anywhere, developing traditions that overlap with the traditional New England holiday but also expand through foods and cultural practices more common in the Sunbelt.

For a variety of reasons Thanksgiving was slow to catch on among Black Americans, but it now has its own community traditions and expectations. In cities, detached cosmopolitans increasingly celebrate Friendsgiving, an interpretation of the holiday that de-emphasizes family in favor of voluntary association. And that, after all, is America; any polyglot society will necessarily demand different interpretations of communal holidays, and Thanksgiving is big enough to fit all of those traditions in. 

Thanksgiving is not often thought of as a national security holiday (Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and of course Independence Day carry more obviously military themes), but it is often most deeply felt by Americans abroad. A more insular holiday than the Fourth, it allows expatriates to indulge their American identity without the kind of patriotic display that can insult or at least annoy their host country.

By most accounts Thanksgiving means a great deal still to soldiers, diplomats, businessmen, journalists, and other Americans who find themselves serving abroad on the final Thursday of each November.

As such service often requires separation from family, the holiday necessarily has a certain bittersweetness, but Thanksgiving rituals also remind expats of the nature and purpose of that service. On a more practical level, Thanksgiving often represents an opportunity for the President and other senior officials to demonstrate solidarity with deployed sailors, soldiers, and diplomats. 

Parting Thoughts 

Some find discussion of the messiness of Thanksgiving off-putting; national holidays should be about national unity and ought to leave criticism and contestation to the side, at least for a day.

This misses not only the point of Thanksgiving but also the nature of the American project. The joy of Thanksgiving is its fractiousness and variety, in that it spans America’s rich demographic landscape without imposing any particular set of practices. Thanksgiving is a mess, but so is America, and both of those facts are worthy of celebration. 

About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley 

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns and Money.