A Festival About Origins

And the Origins of the Festival

When and where was the first Thanksgiving? Massachusetts? Virginia? What exactly does the question mean? What would have to have occurred for us to confer recognition of a 'first Thanksgiving'? These questions have been debated for decades, even centuries. For Thanksgiving's origins are blurry... and the holiday is itself, in many ways, a mythic celebration of the origins of what became the United States. Materials (textual, visual, and other) to build an understanding of these issues of origins will be provided in this section of our prototype Web site, currently under construction.