What kids learn about the ‘first Thanksgiving’

Plus: Debutantes and folk heroes |

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. SUBSCRIBE to TIME Magazine By Lily Rothman Thanksgiving is typically a day for family and food—but for American students, it also tends to be the subject of serious classroom time, and has been for a while. In fact, one 1920s survey of elementary school principals revealed that American schools spent more time talking about Thanksgiving than any other holiday. But what are kids actually learning about the festival day and its history? As it turns out, the answer to that question is changing. This month, TIME's Olivia B. Waxman visited a Thanksgiving-themed teacher workshop at the National Museum of the American Indian. That session, she reports, is just one part of a national movement to bring Thanksgiving education into the 21st century. Click here to learn more about how the typical lesson plan evolved, and what's changing—and happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers. Here's more of the history that made news this week: HISTORY ON TIME.COM The Long Fight Over a Turkey-Free Thanksgiving A Thanksgiving menu featuring 'mock turkey' made entirely from vegetarian ingredients was published as early as 1894 Lee Child: How Jack Reacher Fits Into the History of Heroes "I remember reading Ovid's retelling of the Theseus legend, in school, in Latin. On the bus home I was reading 'Dr. No' by Ian Fleming. And I noticed I was reading the same story, two thousand years later" MI5 and the FBI Evolved Alongside One Another But their relationship hasn't always been a constructive one How the Suez Canal Heralded the Climate Crisis The largest infrastructural project of the 19th century annexed the Middle East into the fossil-fuels complex How the History of Debutante Balls Can Help Us Understand Women's Lives The debutantes we think of today originated and evolved because they were needed to solve a problem: a surplus of daughters. FROM THE TIME VAULT This Week in 1976: The Joy of Art “In art, as in most other matters, the '70s have not yet been named. Historians looking back on American art in the '60s see movements and orthodoxies—Pop art, minimal art, conceptual art, Op art, color-field painting, doctrines about flatness and framing edge, proscriptions, mandates. The categories rattle briskly like punch cards in their slots. Art in the '70s is more polymorphous, less ambitious, harder to sort out. The present creed proclaims belief in the Either, the Or and the Holy Both.” (Nov. 29, 1976) Read the full story   Today in 1960: Business Columnist Sylvia Porter “Sylvia Porter is a press phenomenon. Her daily column, ‘Your Dollar,’ appears in 331 newspapers, giving her a distribution vastly wider than that of any other syndicated business columnist. Her potential readership exceeds 23 million. She appears in papers of the political left (the New York Post), of the center (the Portland Oregonian) and of the right (the Phoenix Arizona Republic); she runs in big papers (the Chicago Daily News, with 550,000 circulation) and small papers (the Fort Smith, Ark. Southwest American , with 18,000). Her column reaches into every state but New Hampshire and Alaska and goes to five countries abroad. It has made her emphatically a capitalist: Sylvia's annual income, including book royalties and the proceeds from a weekly newsletter she publishes, is more than $250,000 a year. Columnist Porter's vast readership gives her a powerful and measurable impact.” (Nov. 28, 1960) Read the full story This Week in 1932: T.E. Lawrence “An archeologist of the first rank, he is now a mechanic and ‘the associate of menials’; once a colonel, he is now, by choice, a private; with a reputation that could still be cashed in for much fine gold, he is content with his army pittance of 60¢ a day. This Royal Air Force mechanic, Aircraftsman Thomas Edward Shaw, known to the world as Col. T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, whose most intellectual duty at present is ‘tinkering with engines,’ has just finished a four-year spare-time job of translating The Odyssey into English prose.’" (Nov. 28, 1932) Read the full story HIGHLIGHTS FROM AROUND THE WEB Inside Men Nearly 75 years after the first atomic bomb test, more of the story of the early nuclear age is still coming to light: William J. Broad at the New York Times has the news that the identity of a fourth Soviet spy at Los Alamos has just been confirmed. Reading List With 2019 wrapping up, here is Smithsonian’s list of the top 10 history books of the year, compiled by Angela Serratore. Deeply Rooted In this op-ed for the Chicago Sun-Times, Natalie Y. Moore writes about reframing the way she thinks about genealogy, and realizing that, as she puts it, “America should be ashamed of slavery but black Americans do not bear the burden of shame.” On Record At Literary Hub, Courtney Taylor examines the role of official archivists in deciding which parts of America’s past should become public. In the Story HBO’s Watchmen has drawn on real history all season, and in this piece at Slate, Lawrence Ware considers what the show has to say about the impact of whitewashing on how we see the past. To Unsubscribe Unsubscribe here if you do not want to receive this newsletter. Update Email Click here to update your email address. Privacy Policy Please read our Privacy Policy. TIME may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice. 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