A Time of Homecoming

Returning to the Nest at Thanksgiving

In the United States, Thanksgiving is the time of year when the greatest number of people are traveling. Most do so by private automobile, but airports, train stations, and bus terminals all bustle with travelers, many of whom are on their way home for Thanksgiving. Indeed, for at least 175 years, the holiday has been bound up with a restless and mobile people's return and ritual meal "back home." And the traces this has left on our culture are numerous.

From Lydia Maria Child's familiar song "Over the River and Through the Wood," and poet John Greenleaf Whittier's "gray-haired New Englander [who] sees round his board/ The old broken links of affection restored" in the 19th century, to the odyssey of two weary travelers in the 1987 movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles; from Horace Greeley's verse, "Come home to Thanksgiving! Dear children, come home!" to the late 19th-century toast to the "magnetic festival that brings back erratic wanderers to the Old Folks at Home," we present a wide range of material on Thanksgiving homecomings as an event in many of our lives and a theme in our imaginations.

Come with us, then through art and literature, journalism, popular culture, and the work of historians and other humanities scholars, to "A Time of Homecoming" and learn about how for at least seven generations, many Americans have taken to the roads heeding the call to home—and many other Americans have been at home, welcoming sons and daughters, grandchildren, cousins and other relations to the Thanksgiving meal.