Thanksgiving

A new biography tells a far more complex, nuanced, and, frankly, interesting historical episode than that depicted in the typical grade-school pageant.

Trader Joe’s stocks an aggressively American version of the Dutch pastry, turning it into a beloved holiday staple nationwide.

Your grandma didn't invent that recipe.

Peanuts’ Franklin has been a controversial character for decades. A new special attempts reparations.

In New England, the birds were once hunted nearly to extinction; now they’re swarming the streets like they own the place. Sometimes turnabout is fowl play.

A popular writer’s 1829 self-help book ‘The Frugal Housewife’ was based on the same democratic principles that made her a champion of the abolitionist cause.

The American yam is not the food it says it is. How that came to be is a story of robbery, reinvention, and identity.

The settlers who are mythologized at Thanksgiving as peace-loving Pilgrims were offering cash for Native American heads less than a generation later.

It's a tale thousands of years in the making.

"My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.”

Celebrations of multiculturalism obscure the country’s settler colonial history—and the role that immigrants play in perpetuating it.

Since we have new presidential pets, Champ and Major, we take a quick look back at one of the nation’s most famous four-legged White House inhabitants.

The word “Plymouth” may conjure up visions of Pilgrims in search of religious freedom, but that vision does not reflect reality.

They were not the nation's first settlers, but they were the most fractious.

Returning the "three sisters" to Native American farms nourishes people, land, and cultures.

Americans are no more selfish in 2020 than they were in the 1940s, the difference between the two moments is about national leadership, not national character.

Descendants of the Pilgrims have highlighted their ancestors’ role in the country’s founding. But their sanitized version of events is only now starting to be told in full.

A tradition as American as apple pie, and older than the Constitution.

The violent catastrophe of the Virginia colonists is the best founding parable of American history.

From November 1969 to June 1971, 89 Red Power activists seized the abandoned prison island of Alcatraz, and their own destinies.

American niceness is the absolute worst thing to ever happen in human history.

It's not enough to say that they pick up critical thinking skills. It's time to offer evidence.

The 19th century recovery of John Winthrop's sermon, "A City on a Hill."

Halloween's most iconic candy (and its most polarizing) used to be a year-round snack. Then came the candy corn explosion.