AMY S GLENN

INBOX

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QUOTES

Quote of the Month

If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.

~ W Clement Stone

News of the Month

The Pilgrims long ago etched their place in the nation’s history as plucky survivors who persevered despite difficult conditions. Remembered and retold as an allegory for perseverance and cooperation, the story of the first Thanksgiving has become an important part of how Americans think about the founding of their country. But what happened four months later, starting in March 1622 about 600 miles south of Plymouth, is far more reflective of the country’s origins - a story not of peaceful coexistence but of distrust, displacement and repression.

Let’s start with the now-traditional story. In September 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth England carrying 102 passengers - an assortment of religious separatists seeking a new home where they could freely practice their faith and other individuals lured by the promise of prosperity and land ownership in the New World. Throughout that first brutal winter, most of the colonists remained on board the ship, where they suffered from exposure, scurvy and outbreaks of contagious disease. Ill-prepared for the New England winter of 1620-1621, they benefited from a terrible epidemic, which had raged among the Indigenous peoples of the region from 1616 to 1619 and which reduced competition for resources. By 1620, the indigenous Wampanoag were in a difficult spot shaped by years of volatile contact with Europeans, slavery, regional threats to their power and the devastating epidemic.

Having endured a winter in which perhaps one-half of the colonists died, the survivors, weakened by malnutrition and illness, welcomed the fall harvest of 1621. They survived because the Wampanoags had taught them how to grow corn (the most important crop in much of eastern North America), extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers and avoid poisonous plants. The two groups forged an alliance that tragically remains one of the few examples of harmony between European colonists and Indigenous peoples. The decision to help the colonists, whose kind had already been raiding native villages and enslaving their people for nearly a century, came after they stole native food and seed stores and dug up native graves, pocketing funerary offerings, as described by Pilgrim leader Edward Winslow in Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.

In November 1621, after the colonists’ first corn harvest proved successful, Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast, which was attended by an uninvited group of the fledgling colony’s indigenous allies. Now remembered as American’s first Thanksgiving - although the Pilgrims themselves may not have used the term at the time - the festival lasted for three days. While no record exists of the historic banquet’s exact menu, the Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow wrote in his journal that Governor Bradford sent four men on a “fowling” mission in preparation for the event and that guests arrived bearing five deer. Historians have suggested that many of the dishes were likely prepared using traditional indigenous spices and cooking methods. Because the Pilgrims had no oven and the Mayflower’s sugar supply had dwindled by the fall of 1621, the meal did not feature pies, cakes or other desserts, which have become a hallmark of contemporary celebrations. Lobster, seal and swans were on the Pilgrims' menu but turkey may or may not have been. This was the event that now marks the first American day of Thanksgiving, even though many Indigenous peoples had long had rituals that included giving thanks and other European settlers had previously declared similar days of thanks - including one in 1541 in Palo Duro Canyon (the Texas panhandle) by Spanish in search of gold, one in St Augustine Florida in 1565, a 1598 Spanish feast with the Pueblo Indians near the Rio Grande (TX) and another along the Maine coast in 1607. Days of fasting and thanksgiving on an annual or occasional basis became common practice in other New England settlements as well. For more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states.

In 1623, Pilgrims in Plymouth held their second Thanksgiving celebration to mark the end of a long drought that had threatened the year’s harvest and prompted Governor Bradford to call for a religious fast and declare a day to thank God for bringing rain. They likely celebrated it in late July. In 1777, in the midst of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress declared a day of Thanksgiving on December 18. The Pilgrims didn’t even get a mention. In the 19th century, however, annual Thanksgiving holidays became linked to New England, largely as a result of campaigns to make the Plymouth experience one of the nation’s origin stories. Promoters of this narrative identified the Mayflower Compact as the starting point for representative government and praised the religious freedom they saw in New England - at least for Americans of European ancestry. As Americans looked for an origin story that wasn’t soaked in the blood of Indigenous peoples or built on the backs of slavery, the humble and bloodless story of the 102 Pilgrims forging a path in the New World in search of religious freedom was just what they needed. Regardless of whether it was rooted in historical fact, it became accepted as such.

The first appearance of the word thanksgiving in The New York Times digital archives - which go back to 1851 - did not refer to the holiday. It instead was a reference on October 4, 1851, to “an appropriate prayer and thanksgiving” from a reverend at the opening of the Queens County’s annual agricultural exhibition. The first mention of the holiday occurred less than a week later, in a brief news item reporting that the governor of Massachusetts had declared Thursday, November 27, 1851, as “a day of public thanksgiving and praise.” There was no national Thanksgiving holiday at the time.

The origin of the national holiday dates to Abraham Lincoln. On October 3, 1863, he called for the country, “in the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity,” to set aside the last Thursday in November as “a day of Thanksgiving.” The Times published his Thanksgiving proclamation on the front page, and several times subsequently. While reciting the country’s many blessings - a productive and growing economy, and bountiful harvests - Lincoln also recommended that Americans give thanks “with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience.” Lincoln’s proclamation was in part a response to Sarah Josepha Hale, an editor who had spent decades campaigning for a national day of gratitude. The idea of the American Thanksgiving feast is a fairly recent fiction. The idyllic partnership of 17th century European Pilgrims and New England Natives sharing a celebratory meal appears to be less than 130 years-old. And it was only after the First World War that a version of such a Puritan-Indian partnership took hold in elementary schools across the American landscape. We can thank the invention of textbooks and their mass purchase by public schools for embedding this Thanksgiving image in our modern minds.

Thanksgiving in 1918 occurred in the midst of a global pandemic. But the atmosphere was surprisingly joyous. World War I had ended on November 11, and the country was celebrating, despite a horrific number of influenza deaths in October. “Thanksgiving Day this year will evoke a gratitude deeper, a spirit of reverence more devout, than America has felt for many years,” a Times editorial on November 19 said. One factor may have been that the pandemic briefly receded that November, before surging again at the end of the year. By 1930, the Depression had begun and the country’s mood was much darker. A front-page headline on Thanksgiving Day that year reported: “450 Tons of Food Given to Needy, But Supply Fails.” The police turned away elderly men and women to reserve the food for families with young children. In 1939, President Franklin D Roosevelt tried to spark the economy by moving Thanksgiving one week earlier, to create a longer Christmas shopping season. Critics mocked the policy as “Franksgiving,” and it failed. Roosevelt announced in 1941 that he was abandoning the experiment for the next year. Roosevelt ultimately settled on the fourth Thursday of the month - a middle ground that made sure the holiday would not occur later than November 28 and that Christmas shopping could always begin in November.

Thanksgiving in 1963 came only six days after the assassination of John F Kennedy, and most public celebrations were canceled. The Macy’s parade was an exception because the organizers felt its cancellation would be a disappointment to millions of children. The Covid-19 pandemic arguably caused a bigger break in Thanksgiving traditions than anything that came before. Beginning with Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation - even during war, depression and tragedy - most Americans found ways to gather with family and friends for a holiday meal. But the threat from the recent pandemic - better understood in 2020 than it had been in 1918 - caused many people to stay home. For most of the 20th century, US Presidents mentioned the Pilgrims in their annual proclamation, helping to solidify the link between the holiday and the colonists. But the origin story of Thanksgiving that’s often told in school - of a friendly meal between colonists and Indigenous peoples - is inaccurate.

The events in Plymouth in 1621 that came to be enshrined in the national narrative were not typical. A more revealing incident took place in Virginia in 1622. Beginning in 1607, English migrants had maintained a small community in Jamestown Virginia, where colonists struggled to survive. Unable to figure out how to find fresh water, they drank from the James River, even during the summer months when the water level dropped and turned the river into a swamp. The bacteria they consumed from doing so caused typhoid fever and dysentery. Despite a death rate that reached 50% in some years, the English decided to stay. Their investment paid off in the mid-1610s when an enterprising colonist named John Rolfe planted West Indian tobacco seeds in the region’s fertile soil. The industry soon boomed.

But economic success did not mean the colony would thrive. Initial English survival in Virginia depended on the good graces of the local Indigenous population. By 1607, Wahunsonacock, the leader of an alliance of Natives called Tsenacomoco, had spent a generation forming a confederation of roughly 30 distinct communities along tributaries of Chesapeake Bay. The English called him Powhatan and labeled his followers the Powhatans. The Powhatans controlled most of the resources in the region and Wahunsonacock could have likely prevented the English from establishing their community at Jamestown. But in 1608, when the newcomers were near starvation, the Powhatans provided them with food. Wahunsonacock also spared Captain John Smith’s life after his people captured the Englishman.

Wahunsonacock’s actions revealed his strategic thinking. Rather than see the newcomers as all-powerful, he likely believed the English would become a subordinate community under his control. After a war from 1609 to 1614 between the English and Powhatans, Wahunsonacock and his allies agreed to peace and coexistence. Wahunsonacock died in 1618 and soon after his passing, Opechancanough, likely one of Wahunsonacock’s brothers, emerged as leader of the Powhatans. Unlike his predecessor, Opechancanough viewed the English with suspicion, especially when they pushed onto Powhatan lands to expand their tobacco fields. By spring 1622, Opechancanough had had enough. On March 22, he and his allies launched a surprise attack. By day’s end, they had killed 347 of the English. They might have killed more except that one Powhatan who had converted to Christianity warned some of the English, giving them the time to escape. Within months, news of the violence spread in England. Edward Waterhouse, the colony’s secretary, detailed the “barbarous Massacre” in a short pamphlet. A few years later, an engraver in Frankfurt captured Europeans’ fears of Indigenous peoples in a haunting illustration for a translation of Waterhouse’s book. Waterhouse wrote of those who died “under the bloudy and barbarous hands of that perfidious and inhumane people.” He reported that the victors had desecrated English corpses. He called them “savages,” resorting to common European descriptions of “wyld Naked Natives” and vowed revenge. Over the next decade, English soldiers launched a brutal war against the Powhatans, repeatedly burning their fields at harvest time in an effort to starve and drive them out.

The Powhatans’ orchestrated attack anticipated other Indigenous rebellions against aggressive European colonizers in 17th-century North America. The English response, too, fit a pattern. Any sign of resistance by “pagans,” as Waterhouse labeled the Powhatans, needed to be suppressed to advance Europeans’ desire to convert Indigenous peoples to Christianity, claim Indigenous lands and satisfy European customers clamoring for goods produced in America. It was this dynamic - not the one of fellowship found in Plymouth in 1621 - that would go on to define the relationship between Indigenous peoples and European settlers for over two centuries. Before the end of the century, violence erupted in New England too, erasing the positive legacy of the feast of 1621. By 1675, simmering tensions exploded in a war that stretched across the region. On a per capita basis, it was among the deadliest conflicts in American history. In 1970, an Aquinnah Wampanoag elder named Wamsutta, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower, pointed to generations of violence against native communities and dispossession. Ever since that day, many Indigenous Americans have observed a National Day of Mourning instead of Thanksgiving. In 1974, The Times ran an article describing the holiday as a “national day of mourning” for many Indigenous peoples. Today’s Thanksgiving - with school kids’ construction paper turkeys and narratives of camaraderie and cooperation between the colonists and Indigenous peoples - obscures the more tragic legacy of the early 17th century.

Before I close, I have to give a nod to that star of modern Thanksgiving - the turkey. The turkeys eaten by Americans today are nothing like the wild turkeys supposedly eaten by the early European settlers in Massachusetts at the original Thanksgiving. Today, more than 99% of the roughly 250 million turkeys produced in the US each year are raised on factory farms and are ready for slaughter at 3 to 5 months old. In 1947, the National Turkey Federation decided to send a live turkey to Harry Truman to promote the poultry industry. It was killed and eaten, as were turkeys subsequently sent to President Dwight Eisenhower. But in 1963, in one of his last official acts before his assassination, President John F Kennedy, when face to face with his live turkey (the 16th), disregarded the sign hung around the bird’s neck that read Good eating, Mr. President, and said: “We'll just let this one grow.” Kennedy didn’t say anything about pardoning the turkey, but the media referred to his act as a pardon, a reprieve. President George HW Bush was the first to pretend that a turkey was receiving an official presidential pardon. Since then, more than 30 turkeys have been officially pardoned by US presidents. President Ronald Reagan began the practice of delivering gifted turkeys back to a farm, although a couple of first ladies had previously sent their gifted birds to regional farms. Since then, pardoning a turkey has become an annual White House custom, before sending the pardoned birds to farms or sanctuaries. Last year President Joe Biden pardoned Peach and Blossom, who had spent the previous night in a luxurious suite at the Willard Hotel in Washington.

Turkeys aside, there is no question that the history between European colonists and Indigenous peoples has not been one of peaceful coexistence. There is no question that much of the “first Thanksgiving” story is based on myth. But all accounts do seem to agree that it included giving thanks for surviving a harrowing situation and sharing a meal with others that are different from us. And at least during that brief time, there was peace and tranquility. Perhaps, in this moment, we should give thanks and take stock of what we are thankful for. It is time to move forward, to be more thankful and thoughtful and less divisive for future generations. Today can be different. As Thanksgiving Day 2025 approaches, the real essence lies in being thankful, expressing appreciation and connecting meaningfully.

Then and Now

November is Native American Heritage Month.

11/01/1512 - Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel were exhibited to the public for the first time.

11/01/1952 - The US exploded the first hydrogen bomb on Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands.

11/01/2025 - National Authors Day

11/01/2025 - All Saints’ Day

11/02/1783 - George Washington issued his Farewell Address to the Army near Princeton NJ.

11/02/1917 - British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour expressed support for a "national Home" for the Jews of Palestine in the Balfour Declaration.

11/02/1920 - Pittsburgh's Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company transmitted the first commercial radio broadcast on KDKA, announcing the live results of the 1920 presidential race between Republican Warren G Harding and Democrat James M Cox, both of Ohio. Westinghouse chose election day as the date for their first broadcast, proving the power of radio "when people could hear the results of the Harding-Cox presidential race before they read about it in the newspaper."

11/02/1930 - Haile Selassie was crowned emperor of Ethiopia.

11/02/1948 - President Truman surprised the experts by being re-elected in a narrow upset over Republican challenger Thomas Dewey.

11/02/1963 - South Vietnamese President Ngo Dihn Diem was assassinated in a military coup.

11/02/1976 - Jimmy Carter became the first candidate from the Deep South since the Civil War to be elected president.

11/02/2025 - Daylight Saving Time ends. Clocks fall back from 2:00 am to 1:00 am.

11/02/2025 - Anniversary of the Crowning of Haile Selassie – Rastafari

11/02/2025 - Día de los Muertos

11/02/2025 - All Souls' Day

11/03/1903 - Panama declared its independence from Colombia.

11/03/1957 - The Soviets launched Sputnik II, the second manmade satellite, into orbit carrying a dog named Laika who died in the experiment.

11/03/1969 - President Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority speech

11/03/1970 - Salvador Allende became president of Chile.

11/03/1991 - Israeli and Palestinian representatives held their first ever face-to-face talks in Madrid, Spain.

11/03/2025 - World Sandwich Day

11/04/1922 - The entrance to King Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered in Egypt.

11/04/1979 - The Iranian hostage crisis began as militants stormed the US Embassy in Tehran. For some of the hostages it was the start of 444 days of captivity.

11/04/1995 - Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli minutes after attending a peace rally.

11/04/2008 - The US elected Barak Obama, its first Black president.

11/04/2025 - US Election Day … You might want to pay attention to CA Prop 50, which was placed on the statewide ballot in response to the redistricting in TX. The measure, if passed, would reshape CA’s congressional districts to add as many as five Democrat-held seats in Congress to offset President Trump's moves in TX and elsewhere to help Republicans in the 2026 election. CA relies on a nonpartisan independent commission to draw congressional districts. If passed, Prop 50 would give the state permission from voters to implement a new map, replacing the existing one through 2030. Then the commission would take back mapmaking power after the next census.

11/05/1940 - FDR won an unprecedented third term in office.

11/05/1946 - Republicans captured control of both the Senate and the House in midterm elections.

11/06/1860 - Former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln defeated three other candidates for the presidency.

11/06/1861 - The Confederacy elected Jefferson Davis to a six-year term as president.

11/06/1986 - On November 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This law, sometimes referred to as IRCA or the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, made it illegal to knowingly employ undocumented immigrants and created penalties for businesses that did so. This law also provided amnesty for undocumented immigrants arriving prior to 1982.

11/07/1811 - Battle of Tippecanoe

11/07/1916 - Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress.

11/07/1917 - Russia's Bolshevik Revolution took place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.

11/07/1944 - FDR won an unprecedented fourth term in office.

11/07/1973 - Congress overrode President Nixon's veto of the War Powers Act, which limits a chief executive's power to wage war without congressional approval.

11/07/1989 - L. Douglas Wilder won the governor's race in Virginia, becoming the first elected black governor in US history.

11/08/1933 - President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civil Works Administration, designed to create jobs for more than 4 million unemployed.

11/08/1994 - Midterm elections resulted in Republicans winning control of the House for the first time in forty years.

11/08/2002 - The UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution giving UN weapons inspectors the muscle they needed to hunt for illicit weapons in Iraq. President Bush said the new resolution presented the Iraqi regime "with a final test."

11/09/1938 - Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in what became known as Kristallnacht.

11/09/1989 - Communist East Germany threw open its borders allowing citizens to travel freely to the West. Joyous Germans danced on top of the Berlin Wall.

11/10/1775 - The US Marines were organized under authority of the Continental Congress.

11/10/1871 - Journalist-explorer Henry Stanley found missing Scottish missionary David Livingstone in central Africa.

11/10/1954 - The Iwo Jima Memorial was dedicated in Arlington VA.

11/10/1982 - The Vietnam Veterans Memorial welcomed its first visitors in Washington DC.

11/10/2025 - The US Marine Corps Birthday

11/11/1620 - Forty-one Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, anchored off Massachusetts, signed a compact calling for a "body politick."

11/11/1831 - Former slave Nat Turner, who had led a violent insurrection, was executed in Jerusalem VA.

11/11/1921 - President Harding dedicated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.

11/11/1926 - US Route 66 was established.

11/11/2025 - Veterans Day

11/11/2025 - Lhabab Duchen – Buddhist

11/11/2025 - Martinmas – Christian

11/12/1942 - The WWII Naval Battle of Guadalcanal began. The Americans won a major victory over the Japanese.

11/13/1789 - Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter to a fried, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

11/13/1927 - The Holland Tunnel opened to the public, providing access between New York City and New Jersey beneath the Hudson River.

11/13/1940 - The Walt Disney animated movie Fantasia had its world premiere in New York.

11/13/1942 - The minimum draft age was lowered from 21 to 18.

11/13/1956 - The Supreme Court struck down laws calling for racial segregation on public buses.

11/13/1982 - The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington DC.

11/13/2023 - The US Supreme Court announced that it had adopted a Code of Conduct for its justices. The code specified that justices should uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary; avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety; perform their duties fairly, impartially and diligently; engage in extrajudicial activities that are consistent with the obligations of the judicial office; and refrain from political activity. The Supreme Court had been the only court in the country without a binding ethics code and that lack had led to increased scrutiny, especially in cases where the justices’ conduct or potential conflicts of interest raised questions about their independence, impartiality and political neutrality. The justices adopted the new code, they explained, only because of some “misunderstanding” by the public about their honesty and integrity, and asserted that the code simply summarized ethical restrictions that the Court has long followed anyway. The code also called for the justices to judge themselves. There was no mechanism to enforce, apply or even interpret the code, and the principles themselves included multiple loopholes not found in the codes of the lower courts. Courts cannot function unless the public has faith that they are acting impartially and with moral integrity, and it is crucial to have robust and enforceable safeguards in place to ensure that happens.

11/14/1851 - Herman Melville's Moby Dick was first published.

11/14/1922 - The BBC began its domestic radio service.

11/15/1777 - The Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation.

11/15/1864 - Killer and arsonist William T. Sherman and his troops began their March to the Sea.

11/15/1889 - Brazil's monarchy was overthrown.

11/15/1926 - NBC debuted with a radio network of 24 stations.

11/15/1998 - Civil Rights activist Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) died in Guinea at the age of 57.

11/15/2022 - World population reached 8 billion.

11/15/2025 - Shichi-Go-San (Seven-Five-Three) – Shinto

11/16/1849 - A Russian court sentenced novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for his alleged anti-government activities. At the last minute, his execution was stayed.

11/17/1800 - Congress held its first session in Washington in the partially completed Capitol Building.

11/17/1869 - The Suez Canal opened in Egypt.

11/17/1871 - The National Rifle Association was incorporated.

11/17/1969 - Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the US and the Soviet Union began.

11/18/1820 - Navy Captain Nathaniel Palmer discovered the frozen continent of Antarctica.

11/18/1883 - The US and Canada adopted a system of Standard Time zones.

11/18/1928 - The first successful sound-synchronized animated cartoon, Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie, premiered in New York.

11/18/1966 - US Roman Catholic bishops did away with the rule against eating meat on Fridays.

11/18/1978 - The Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, established a community called Jonestown in northwestern Guyana. On this date, more than 900 Americans died in Jonestown from cyanide poisoning in what is commonly referred to as the Jonestown Massacre.

11/18/1987 - The Congressional Iran-Contra committees issued their final report saying President Reagan bore "ultimate responsibility" for wrong-doing by his aides.

11/18/1999 - Twelve people died when an annual bonfire under construction at Texas A&M University collapsed.

11/18/2025 - Mickey Mouse’s Birthday

11/19/1863 - President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

11/19/1919 - The US Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles.

11/19/1977 - Egyptian President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader to visit Israel.

11/20/1789 - New Jersey became the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights.

11/20/1945 - The Nuremberg Trials began as Nazi leaders went on trial before an international war crimes tribunal.

11/20/1967 - The US Census Clock ticked past 200 million.

11/21/1877 - Thomas Edison announced he had invented the phonograph.

11/21/1922 - Rebecca Felton (Georgia) became the first woman to serve in the US Senate. (She filled the vacancy caused by the death of the state's senator and served one day.)

11/21/1963 - President John Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, began a two-day tour of Texas.

11/21/1969 - The Senate voted down the Supreme Court nomination of Clement F. Haynsworth, the first such rejection since 1930.

11/22/1718 - English pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, died during a battle off the Virginia coast.

11/22/1906 - The International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin adopted the SOS distress signal.

11/22/1928 - Maurice Ravel's Bolero made its debut in Paris.

11/22/1963 - President John Kennedy was shot to death while riding in a motorcade in Dallas.

11/22/1975 - Juan Carlos became King of Spain.

11/23/1889 - The first jukebox debuted in San Francisco's Palais Royale Saloon.

11/23/1936 - Life magazine was first published.

11/23/1971 - The first UN Security Council meeting at which a representative of People's Republic of China participated.

11/23/2025 - Christ the King Sunday – Christian

11/24/1859 - Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It immediately sold out.

11/24/1963 - Jack Ruby shot and mortally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald.

11/24/2025 - Martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji – Sikh

11/25/1783 - The British evacuated NY, their last military position in the US during the Revolutionary War.

11/25/1986 - The Iran-Contra affair erupted as President Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese revealed that profits from secret arms sales to Iran had been diverted to Nicaraguan rebels.

11/25/2002 - President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security.

11/25/2025 - Day of the Covenant – Baha’i

11/25/2025 - Mangé Yam (fête de la moisson) – Vodún

11/26/1942 - Casablanca had its world premiere in NY.

11/26/1950 - China entered the Korean conflict by launching a counteroffensive against soldiers from the UN, the US and South Korea.

11/27/1901 - The US Army War College opened in Washington DC.

11/27/1973 - The Senate voted 92-3 to confirm Gerald Ford as vice president, succeeding Spiro Agnew.

11/27/1997 - Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said he would allow visits to presidential palaces where UN weapons experts suspected he had hidden chemical and biological weapons.

11/27/2025 - Thanksgiving Day

11/28/1521 - Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Pacific Ocean after passing through the South American strait that now bears his name.

11/28/1925 - The Grand Ole Opry made its radio debut on station WSM.

11/28/1975 - President Ford nominated federal Judge John Paul Stevens to the US Supreme Court.

11/28/2025 - Black Friday

11/28/2025 - Ascension of Abdu’l-Baha – Baha’i

11/29/1864 - The Colorado militia killed at least 150 peaceful Cheyenne Indians in the Sand Creek Massacre.

11/29/1947 - The UN passed a resolution calling for the partitioning of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. I urge you to read this historical Times article that tells the story of the individuals involved in the days leading up to the UN vote.

11/29/1963 - President Johnson named a commission headed by Earl Warren to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.

11/30/1782 - The US and Britain signed preliminary peace articles in Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War.

11/30/1966 - The former British colony of Barbados became independent.

11/30/1981 - The US and the Soviet Union opened negotiations in Geneva aimed at reducing nuclear weapons in Europe.

11/30/2025 - St Andrew's Day – Christian

11/30/2025 - First Sunday of Advent – Christian

LINKS

Online Resource Links

How Wobbly Is Our Democracy? | The American Abyss | US is polarizing faster than other democracies. | The Ballad of Downward Mobility | A Crisis Coming … The Twin Threats To American Democracy: (1) A Growing Movement to Refuse to Accept Defeat in an Election and (2) Policy and Election Results that Are Increasingly Less Connected to What the Public Wants | America’s Surprising Partisan Divide on Life Expectancy | ‘Freedom’ Means Something Different to Liberals and Conservatives. Here’s How the Definition Split - and Why That Still Matters.| Politics is personal. | For elites, politics is driven by ideology. For voters, it’s not. | Trust and Distrust in America | One America is thriving; the other is stagnating. How long can this go on? | America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good - The great “convergence” of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly. | Are we really facing a second Civil War? | How ‘Stop the Steal’ Captured the American Right | Conspiracy theorists want to run America’s elections. These are the candidates standing in their way. | Two Americas Index: Democracy deniers | Where will this political violence lead? Look to the 1850s. | American Democracy Was Never Designed to Be Democratic | Yes, the economy is important, but we found that election subversion attempts appear to matter more to voters than polling suggests. | Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign, in His Own Menacing Words | A Warning | We Are in a Five-Alarm Fire for Democracy | According to Freedom House, the US, whose aggregate score for political rights and civil liberties fell 11 points between 2010 and 2020, now falls near the middle of the free spectrum, behind Slovenia, Croatia and Mongolia. | The Looming Contest Between Two Presidents and Two Americas | Why Losing Political Power Now Feels Like ‘Losing Your Country’ | Here Is One Way to Steal the Presidential Election | In tense election year, state officials face climate of intimidation. | In the GOP’s new surveillance state, everyone’s a snitch. | Political scientists want to know why we hate one another this much. | How Civil Wars Start: Three factors come into play, and the US demonstrates all of them. | Political violence may be un-American, but it is not uncommon. | The Political Violence Spilling Out of Red States | A powerful Christian conservative legal group is quietly reshaping America through the courts. Here’s what it’s after. | In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government. | An honest assessment of rural white resentment is long overdue. | This is the unspoken promise of Trump’s return. | American Democracy in its Final Death Throes | Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025) | Project 2025: Summary and Chapter Breakdown | Are we sleepwalking into autocracy? | How to Destroy What Makes America Great | Trump Just Bet the Farm | The question of the day is whether the US is embroiled in a constitutional crisis.

At The Brink: A Series about the Threat of Nuclear Weapons in an Unstable World | The Brink: If it seems alarmist to anticipate the horrifying aftermath of a nuclear attack, consider this: The US and Ukraine governments have been planning for the scenario for at least two years. The possibility of a nuclear strike, once inconceivable in modern conflict, is more likely now than at any other time since the Cold War. | A nuclear weapon strikes. What happens next? (8:10) | 72 Minutes Until the End of the World? | The Doomsday Clock 2024: It’s 90 seconds to midnight. The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has left the hands of the Doomsday Clock unchanged due to ominous trends that continue to point the world toward global catastrophe. (Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies.) | The Toll: The Threat of Nuclear Weapons in an Unstable World | Proud Prophet: The Secret Pentagon Nuclear War Game That Offers a Stark Warning for Our Times

Visualizing the State of Global Debt, by Country: The debt-to-GDP ratio is a simple metric that compares a country’s public debt to its economic output. By comparing how much a country owes and how much it produces in a year, economists can measure a country’s theoretical ability to pay off its debt. The World Bank published a study showing that countries that maintained a debt-to-GDP ratio of over 77% for prolonged periods of time experienced economic slowdowns.

What ISIS Really Wants: The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy and for how to stop it | ISIS Claims Responsibility, Calling Paris Attacks First of the Storm | Syria Iraq: The Islamic State Militant Group | Isis: The Inside Story | Frontline: The Rise of ISIS | Council on Foreign Relations: A Primer on ISIS | Cracks in ISIS Are Becoming More Clear | How ISIS’ Attacks Harm the Middle East | Timeline: the Rise, Spread and Fall of the Islamic State

Keeping the Shi'ites Straight Based on the opinion that no story has been more confusing for the Western news media to cover in postwar Iraq than the politics of the country's Shi'ite majority, this article provides a basic outline of Shi'ite religious history. Discusses the Sadr family (Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr, Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, and Muqtada as-Sadr), Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and other figures.

What it’s like to live on $2 a day in the United States (PDF)

Check out Today's Front Pages. Each day, you can see the front pages of more than 800 newspapers from around the world in their original, unedited form.

PBS's 30 Second Candidate allows you to view more political ads than you ever knew existed. Choose the Historical Timeline link to see how political ads have changed over the years. Start with the infamous Daisy Ad that Lyndon Johnson used against Barry Goldwater. Click on Watch Johnson ads. Then click on either the QuickTime link or the Real Video link next to Daisy.

Check out the Political Compass. The site does a good job of explaining political ideologies (although with definitions different from those I use) and gives you a chance to discover your own political philosophy.

Law Library of Congress: North Korea: Collection of links to websites on North Korean government, politics and law. Includes legal guides, country studies and links to constitutions and branches of government (where available). Council on Foreign Relations: North Korea: Background, articles and opinion pieces about North Korea government and politics. Many of the articles focus on North Korea's nuclear program. From the Council on Foreign Relations, "an independent membership organization and a nonpartisan think tank and publisher."

State of the Union (SOTU): The site uses an interactive timeline to provide a visual representation of prominent words in presidential State of the Union addresses by displaying significant words as "determined by comparing how frequently the word occurs in the document to how frequently it appears throughout the entire body of SOTU addresses." The Appendices section describes the statistical methods used. Also includes the full text of addresses.

Small Town Papers: This site provides access to scanned images of recent issues of dozens of small town newspapers from throughout the United States. Newspapers are updated periodically, 2-3 weeks after publication. The site also includes a searchable archive (of articles, photos and advertisements), which covers different periods for each paper, some as far back as the 1890s. Access to the archives requires free registration.

This website serves as a centralized location to learn about the Congressional Research Service and search for CRS reports that have been released to the public by members of Congress. (CRS Reports do not become public until a member of Congress releases the report.) Features a searchable database with more than 8,000 reports, a list of recently released reports, other collections of CRS reports and a FAQ about CRS.

Stem Cell Research: See the official NIH resource for Stem Cell Research. In 2005, NOVA aired an overview of The Stem Cell Issue.

Instances of the Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798 - 2020: This report lists hundreds of instances in which the United States has used its armed forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes. It was compiled in part from various older lists and is intended primarily to provide a rough survey of past US military ventures abroad, without reference to the magnitude of the given instance noted. | Here's How Bad a Nuclear War Would Actually Be | This is What It’s Like to Witness a Nuclear Explosion

Government Product Recalls

Homeland Security Knowledge Base

If you're worried about retirement, try some of these sites: IRS Tax Information for Retirement Plans | Social Security Retirement Planner | Retirement Planning Resources from Smart Money

This commercial site presents brief information about dozens of Black Inventors from the United States. Some entries include portraits and images. Also includes a searchable timeline covering 1721-1988. Does not include bibliographic information.

Annenberg Political Fact Check: This site describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit, consumer advocate for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in US politics. The site provides original articles, with summaries and sources, analyzing factual accuracy in TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Searchable. From the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

The State of State and Local Finances: New studies afford a state-by-state or city-by-city analysis of fiscal well being. The Year of Living Dangerously: While leaders in a growing number of states appear to believe they're serving the public good by squeezing government dry, there's little question that minimizing management carries a host of dangers that directly affect the lives of citizens.

First Amendment Library: Provides info on Supreme Court First Amendment jurisprudence, including rulings, arguments, briefs, historical material, commentary and press coverage.

Happy Thanksgiving 2025

SPOTLIGHTS

Community Service

If you need a presentation or workshop for your group,

use this Community link or the link at the top of the page.
The link will take you to a list of the topics I currently have available.
To schedule a date or for more information, feel free to contact me at dramyglenn@gmail.com