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Think you know everything about the history of Thanksgiving? Here’s 21 facts that will prove you wrong
From tales of pumpkin-pie panics to the story of the president who turned his dinner into a pet, Jonny Wilkes uncovers the surprising history behind Thanksgiving: America’s turkey-tastic holiday
There are only two accounts of the first Thanksgiving The story of the first Thanksgiving has been highly mythologised in American history. In 1621, the so-called Pilgrims who travelled on the Mayflower and formed the settlement of Plymouth, in Massachusetts, came together with the local indigenous peoples, the Wampanoag, for a feast to celebrate a good harvest and the growing friendship of settler and Native American in the New World. That is the version long told in schools. In truth, the Pilgrims threw themselves a harvest festival and around 90 of the Wampanoag showed up. Without their help, especially a man named Squanto, the European settlers would have likely perished in their brutal first winter. The only sources for the three-day feast are sparse mentions in writings by two of the Pilgrims, Edward Winslow and William Bradford. Neither actually used the word ‘thanksgiving’, however, and since they gave few details of what happened, the mythologising took over. They may not have eaten turkey at the first Thanksgiving For many Americans, no modern Thanksgiving meal is complete without a turkey as the centrepiece of the table. It’s unclear, however, whether this tradition began in 1621. The Pilgrims cooked up a selection of fowl – which may have included turkey, but could just as easily been duck and goose – while the Wampanoag killed a number of deer, meaning venison was on the menu. They might have had seafood, too, including eels, clams, mussels and lobster. Yes, William Bradford mentioned a “great store of wild Turkies” in the region, but the bird did not become a staple of the Thanksgiving meal until the 19th century. The first Thanksgiving may have happened earlier than 1621 While the 1621 feast became the foundation for the Thanksgiving holiday, perhaps Americans should celebrate a different year. Other acts of thanksgiving, based in the tradition of Christian harvest festivals, took place earlier in the short-lived Popham Colony in Maine and Jamestown in Virginia, both founded in 1607. Two years before the Pilgrims and Wampanoag, the Berkeley Hundred settlement, also in Virginia, held a celebration and decreed that the same day should be “perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God”. The true first Thanksgiving, however, was not English, but Spanish. On 8 September 1565, in what is now St Augustine, Florida, hundreds of Spaniards held a religious ceremony and shared a meal with the local people to mark their safe arrival. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/3C5BDJ6-54ff763-e1764176698213.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicts a large crowd of men kneeling on the ground, holding up spears. In front of them, a priest stands in cream and yellow robes and holds a cross" title="A painting depicts Spanish settlers arriving in what is now the city of St Augustine, Florida, in 1565. Their meal with the local indigenous population has been described as the first true Thanksgiving (Image by Alamy)" /> Americans eat around 46 million turkeys every year A major reason why turkey became the meat of choice for Thanksgiving is that the birds are both abundant and large (meaning a lot of meat), and it’s a good thing, too. There’s a reason the holiday is also referred to as Turkey Day. With apologies to the non-meat eaters out there, it is estimated that around 46 million birds are killed for the holiday every year in the US alone, according to the Department of Agriculture. That’s one turkey for every seven or eight Americans. The fastest time to carve a turkey is under four minutes Without wanting to dismay all the Americans who take immense pride in serving up the meal every Thanksgiving, the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to carve a turkey is currently held by a British person. The UK does eat its fair share of turkeys at Christmas, after all. In 2009, Paul Kelly, a turkey farmer in Essex, managed the feat in just three minutes and 19.47 seconds. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/4GettyImages-530209391-de2c182-e1764176657592.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="An illustration of a colourful turkey. It has a red and blue spotted head, with yellow and dark orange feathers across it's front, and blue wings, with a red and black tail" title="A mid-19th century illustration of a turkey. An apocryphal quote attributed to Founding Father Alexander Hamilton states that no “citizen of the United States should refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day” (Image by Getty Images)" /> The author of Mary Had a Little Lamb is known as the ‘Mother of Thanksgiving’ Sarah Josepha Hale was a writer, the first American woman to be editor of a magazine and, in 1830, she published the nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb (originally titled Mary's Lamb). One of her biggest passions, though, would always be Thanksgiving. Born in 1788 in New England, she grew up with the local celebrations and customs that took place every year, and wanted Thanksgiving to become a national holiday. For years, she embarked on this campaign, writing editorials for her magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had a peak circulation of 150,000, as well as countless letters to presidents asking for their help. Finally getting somewhere with Abraham Lincoln, she is now heralded as the ‘Mother of Thanksgiving’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/6GettyImages-3245390-8ee41b9-e1764176761138.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration of a woman sitting in a high backed chair. She is wearing a dark dress with a white lace collar and has ringlets in her hair" title="Sarah Josepha Hale is best known as the ‘Mother of Thanksgiving’ – and for writing a much-loved nursery rhyme (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1705, a town postponed Thanksgiving because of pumpkin pie Until Sarah Josepha Hale’s campaign, it was up to each town and state to determine how to mark Thanksgiving, with most of the events taking place only in the US northeast. For the people of Colchester, Connecticut, the celebrations must include pumpkin pie. The dessert had become a symbol of the bounty of the New World. In 1705, however, they faced a problem: bad weather prevented supplies from reaching them, including the molasses that they needed to make their pies. Rather than have a Thanksgiving without them, the townsfolk elected to postpone the festivities for a week until the molasses could be delivered. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/7GettyImages-509616436-453ca45-e1764177624580.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a bright orange pumpkin pie with small dollops of cream on the top of each slice" title="Can you really have Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie? Well, one town in Connecticut decided to postpone their festivities when they were unable to source the correct ingredients in 1705 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Thomas Jefferson was opposed to Thanksgiving (sort of) In 1789, George Washington issued a presidential proclamation naming Thursday 26 November as a “day of public thanksgiving and prayer”. This did not make the holiday official, as each president had to issue their own proclamations every year. While John Adams followed Washington’s example, the third president, Thomas Jefferson, did not. He did not oppose families coming together for a nice meal – in fact, he encouraged it as governor of Virgina – but he felt that the religious significance of Thanksgiving meant the president could not endorse it. Otherwise, he would undermine the separation of church and state as established by the first amendment of the Constitution, which he had helped get written. Benjamin Franklin preferred turkey to bald eagles The bald eagle has been a national emblem since being chosen to adorn the Great Seal of the United States in 1782. However, the decision did not meet the approval of the great polymath and Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin. He thought the bald eagle had “bad moral character”, “generally poor”, “often very lousy” and a “rank coward”, as he wrote in a letter to his daughter. The turkey, on the other hand, was a “much more respectable bird and withal a true, original native of America,” in his opinion. Read more | Benjamin Franklin's greatest inventions Franklin was effusive in his praise, describing the turkey as “though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.” The cornucopia has ancient origins A horn-shaped basket overflowing with the fruits of the harvest, the cornucopia is a symbol of abundance. As such, it has come to be associated with Thanksgiving and is a common feature of the decorations. The origins of the horn of plenty have nothing to do with the Pilgrims or Wampanoag in 1621, or with Sarah Josepha Hale and Lincoln: it goes back much further. According to ancient Greek mythology, the god Zeus was raised by Amalthea, either an enchanted goat or a water nymph with an enchanted goat. Either way, one day the baby deity broke off one of the horns and it began pouring forth fruits, seeds and nuts. To the Romans, however, Hercules created the horn by snapping it off a river god. Thanksgiving became a national holiday during the American Civil War Sarah Josepha Hale tried for years to get Thanksgiving recognised as a national holiday, but it was with the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 that the circumstances finally came together. In 1863, she wrote to President Abraham Lincoln arguing that Thanksgiving could heal the divided and hurting country, and he agreed. Less than a week later, he issued a proclamation declaring a holiday on the last Thursday of November – and so Thanksgiving has been celebrated ever since, with a few exceptions. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/11GettyImages-515449646-0a00406-e1764176933734.jpg" width="1501" height="1002" alt="a black and white photograph of a large group of soldiers standing around a tall man in a long coat and top hat. Behind them is a series of large tents" title="Abraham Lincoln meets Union troops near Sharpsburg, Maryland, in October 1862. A year later, the Civil War president issued a proclamation declaring Thanksgiving to be a national holiday (Image by Getty Images)" /> A small Pacific island has celebrated Thanksgiving since the 1800s Thanksgiving is not celebrated only in the US: Canada marks it in October, while festivities can be seen in countries around the world. A contender for the most unlikely place has to be Norfolk Island, a tiny Australian territory in the Pacific Ocean home to just over 2,000 people. Yes, Thanksgiving comes on a Wednesday, not Thursday, and there are a lot of local dishes alongside the pumpkin pie, but the holiday is firmly rooted in American traditions. It began in the 1800s when American sailors and whalers made regular stops there. One American, Isaac Robinson, settled on Norfolk Island and made a big deal of celebrating Thanksgiving. After he died, the islanders just kept it going. The inaugural Turkey Trot had only six runners Every year on or around Thanksgiving, around a million people put on their running shoes – and maybe a turkey costume – and take part in their local Turkey Trot, one of many races held all over the US. If nothing else, the run will help counter all the calories about to be consumed. The Turkey Trot began in Buffalo, New York, in 1896, on a much smaller scale. Just six runners started the five-mile course, with four finishing. One pulled out after two miles, while another had to stop when his “late breakfast refused to keep in its proper place”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/13GettyImages-1444263993-f9f153a-e1764176982360.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="A photograph of several people running along a road, each with a number pinned to their front. In the front of the image is a man running dressed as a turkey" title="Thousands of Americans attempt to offset their Thanksgiving calorie intake by taking part in a Turkey Trot – such as this annual event in Dana Point, California, photographed in 2022 (Image by Getty Images)" /> The first Macy’s Parade featured live animals, not balloons Another constant of Thanksgiving television is the Macy’s Parade. Best known today for the storeys-high balloons in the shapes of beloved characters, when the department store first planned a parade through the streets of New York in 1924, the main attraction was a bit livelier – literally. They borrowed animals from Central Park Zoo, including elephants, tigers, bears, camels and monkeys. Some 10,000 people attended the Macy’s Christmas Parade, so-called as it launched shopping season for Christmas, preferably at Macy’s at Herald Square, rather than celebrated Thanksgiving. Read more | The history of Christmas, plus 10 festive facts you might not know Snoopy has the most appearances in the Macy’s Parade The famous Macy’s Parade balloons made their debut in 1927, with the honour of the first character going to Felix the Cat. It is a dog, however, who has been flown through the streets of Manhattan on Thanksgiving more than any other. Since 1968, Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s loyal companion from the beloved Peanuts comics by Charles M Schulz, has clocked up more than 40 appearances with eight different balloons. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/152DB0047-3e97b86-e1764177046383.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a large balloon depicting Snoopy the dog. He is all white with black nose and ears, and has a yellow bird on his head" title="Snoopy has long been a fixture of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, notching up more than 40 appearances. This particular incarnation of the beagle, photographed in 2013, featured his bird friend Woodstock perched on his head (Image by Alamy)" /> Calvin Coolidge was sent a raccoon for his Thanksgiving meal In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge received an unusual present from one of his supporters: a live raccoon, along with a note suggesting that it would make a delicious Thanksgiving meal. Rather than send the animal to the oven, though, Coolidge decided to keep it as a pet. Named Rebecca, she had free rein of the White House and its grounds, and at the end of his presidency Coolidge and his wife, Grace, sent the raccoon into retirement at a zoo in Washington, DC. Read more | 10 famous people in history and their bizarre pets <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/16FFWH1F-8ddae15-e1764177100383.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman in a dress and large hat, holding a raccoon in her arms" title="President Calvin Coolidge’s wife, Grace, seen with the couple’s pet raccoon in 1927. The procyonid – which was given the name Rebecca – was originally intended to have been eaten as part of Thanksgiving dinner (Image by Alamy)" /> The Detroit Lions always play Thanksgiving football American football is as much a part of Thanksgiving as turkey, with millions tuning in to the blockbuster matches that afternoon. It’s a big day for the sport, but especially for fans of the Detroit Lions since they play every year. This custom goes back to 1934. When radio executive George Richards bought an Ohio-based team and moved them to Detroit, Michigan, he had the idea to drum up excitement by putting on a game on Thanksgiving, when everyone was off work. It was inspired: the game between the Lions and the champion Chicago Bears sold out, and became an instant annual tradition. In 1966, the Dallas Cowboys got in on the act and now they have their own game too. There were two Thanksgivings in 1939, 1940 and 1941 President Franklin D Roosevelt made a bold decision in 1939 to go against precedent and move Thanksgiving up a week. The issue was that the traditional date for the holiday fell on the last day of November that year, leading retailers to warn FDR about the economic damage a late Thanksgiving would have on Christmas shopping. Not everyone was happy with the date change, dubbed ‘Franksgiving’, with Time magazine even comparing FDR to Adolf Hitler. With many states ignoring it and celebrating on the usual day, the US had two Thanksgivings. Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp” Despite the criticism, the president doubled down and did the same thing the following year. Congress got involved in late 1941, passing a resolution to set the date for Thanksgiving once and for all – but not before that year's festivities had already been impacted too. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/18GettyImages-535083952-ee1697d-e1764177144853.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a smiling couple sitting next to each other at a dining table. The man is carving a turkey while the woman looks on" title="Franklin D Roosevelt carves a turkey during his first Thanksgiving as president, 1933. Six years later, his decision to move the date of the holiday would spark national controversy (Image by Getty Images)" /> The day after Thanksgiving is the busiest day of the year for plumbers Perhaps this should not be all that surprising: with large groups gathering under a single roof to eat a huge meal, clogging up the kitchen drainage and – ahem – bathroom pipes, the pressure on America’s plumbing peaks at Thanksgiving. The day after the celebrations, therefore, proves to be an extremely busy time for plumbers. One national company claims they see a 50 per cent increase in calls from the average Friday. While everyone else is calling it ‘Black Friday’, the plumbers of America have come to refer to it as ‘Brown Friday’. Presidents have the power to pardon turkeys Every Thanksgiving, the president performs one of their stranger duties: the pardon of one or two turkeys. Freed from the dinner table, they are sent for a long life on a farm or petting zoo (or, in some cases, Disneyland). The custom officially began with George HW Bush in 1989, although its roots go back further. When a turkey was sent to the White House for the Thanksgiving meal, JFK, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter all chose to let them live. Ronald Reagan did the same, although he went so far as to use the word “pardon”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/19-WIKIPresidentRonaldReaganreceivesthe40thWhiteHouseThanksgivingTurkey1987-68d3e64-e1764177226575.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people stand around a white turkey as it tries to take flight" title="Ronald Reagan pardons Charlie the turkey in 1987. As well as having to deal with a very flappy bird, the president also had to field questions from the press regarding the Iran-Contra affair" /> The same day also marks the National Day of Mourning For many Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause for celebration, but a stark reminder of the oppression of the Native American population. The image of the first Thanksgiving – where European settler and indigenous people sat side-by-side in peace – is a myth that glosses over the centuries of brutality and persecution that followed. The last Thursday in November, therefore, is a time of protest. It began in 1970 when Wamsutta Frank James, an elder of the Aquinnah Wampanoag, was refused the chance to give a speech he had written for the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower, which spoke of the painful legacy of colonisation and governmental subjugation. Instead, he led a group of protesters in Plymouth and declared the first National Day of Mourning. Today, the United American Indians of New England (UAINE) organise a march and rally to honour their ancestors and educate the public about why Thanksgiving should be about more than giving thanks.
Toilets through time: early modern chamber pots
Professor Mark Stoyle leads David Musgrove into the early modern water closet
David Musgrove and Mark Stoyle tackle the toilets of the early modern period – from Samuel Pepys' graphic garderobe confessions to chamber pots and literary loo paper Samuel Pepys describes in great detail the toilet experiences of 17th-century Londoners. But how far did that reflect the bathroom habits of the whole population? For this final episode of Toilets through Time, Professor Mark Stoyle leads David Musgrove into the early modern water closet.
Myspace and MTV: how will future historians study the 21st century?
Jane Winters and John Wills discuss how social media and digital records chart the story of recent decades – and how they pose a challenge for historians
From social-media accounts to TV shows and video games, recent decades offer an enormous wealth of material for future historians to explore. But what are the challenges presented by this vast amount of data? And how will historical researchers a hundred years from now make sense of 2025? Matt Elton spoke to historians Jane Winters and John Wills to answer these questions – and find out how the ephemeral digital archives of our current era might differ from the historical sources of previous generations.
Sex and sensationalism: a history of the tabloids
Terry Kirby investigates the 500-year history of tabloid journalism – from the first gossip rags to the muckraking exploits of the 20th-century popular press
Tabloid journalists often get a bad press. From publishing libellous headlines to hacking celebrities’ phones, recent years have not exactly done much to enhance Fleet Street’s reputation. But where did tabloid journalism originally come from? And have media barons always had such a profound influence on current affairs? Journalism lecturer Terry Kirby talks to Jon Bauckham about the evolution of the popular press, covering everything from Georgian gossip sheets to the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Terry Kirby is the author of The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism (Reaktion Books, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon
"Violence and American politics have gone hand in hand right from the beginning": a history of political violence
Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024, Matt Elton spoke to historian Adam IP Smith about the history of violent attacks on US leaders. In this interview, first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine, Smith discussed the political and social repercussions of such assaults across the decades
Matt Elton: Assassinations, and attempted assassinations, have occurred around the world throughout history. But is there a particularly American aspect to this story of political violence? Adam IP Smith: I think there is. Political violence is hardly unique to the US, sadly, so we must be careful about ascribing American exceptionalism to what we saw at Donald Trump’s rally [in Pennsylvania on 13 July 2024]. There is nevertheless an American political tradition into which this specific kind of gun violence – the attempted assassination of leading political figures, especially presidents and presidential candidates – fits. On the podcast | Adam IP Smith on assassinations that shaped US history As a historian, do you think it’s a stretch to suggest that the violence that shaped the founding of the modern nation may have paved the way for later political violence in the US? Certainly the political polarisation and the potential for political violence we’re seeing today form part of a recurrent pattern in US history. There are several reasons, but maybe the core one is that there’s long been a fundamental disagreement within the US about who constitutes the legitimate American nation. That has led to a fear, genuinely held by significant numbers of people involved in the political process, that the stakes are so high because if their political enemies win then everything will be lost – that their freedom, the republic, even their own place in society will be jeopardised. That’s partly because, from the beginning, the president of the United States has held many of the powers held by monarchs – in some respects, even greater powers. George Washington had more influence over the government of the US than George III had over the government in London, for instance. So the monarchical style of the US head of state puts a huge amount of pressure on that role, which needs to feel like the embodiment of America at that particular moment in time. The first US president targeted was Andrew Jackson in 1835 – an episode that’s less familiar to many in the UK than later attempts. Why is that? The reason may be just that it was unsuccessful: the gun wielded by the would-be assassin malfunctioned. If Jackson had been shot on the steps of the Capitol, then we would know about it. Jackson already had a bullet lodged in him from an earlier duel, one of several he’d fought (in one of which, some 30 years earlier, he’d killed a man). So Jackson himself was no stranger to gun violence. He was a deeply controversial and polarising figure – and, perhaps not irrelevantly to this conversation, the president to whom those advancing Trump’s agenda have most wanted to compare Trump. Read more | 50 assassinations that changed the world Jackson was kind of an outsider – the original ‘drain the Washington swamp’ candidate. He first ran to become president in 1824, but failed due to what he called a “corrupt bargain”, and argued that the election had been stolen from him. He ran again in 1828 and won convincingly, defeating John Quincy Adams, who was the last of the old guard. In fact, Jackson was a wealthy slave holder in Tennessee – he wasn’t some hard-scrabble guy anymore – but he had literally been born in a log cabin and had worked his way up. Like Trump – indeed, like Trump’s new running mate, JD Vance, and many other big figures in American political history – he was of Scots Protestant Irish descent. The tradition that Jackson, Trump and Vance have tried to embody is one of rugged individualism, of standing up for yourself. It’s a kind of frontier mythos – the idea that in the end you have nothing to rely on but your wits and your bravery and your courage, and it’s all about you and your family. Jackson was both a perpetrator and a victim of gun violence. So in a way, if he had have been shot, it wouldn’t have fundamentally changed the image of him. It would almost have seemed fitting for him to die in that way, such was the nature of the romance built up around him. Some presidential assassinations had repercussions not just in the US but on the world stage. What examples are particularly illuminating in terms of that wider picture? The global impact of these events is one way of measuring the significance of the US in people’s imaginations. News of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 reached Britain a week or so after the event, having been carried by the fastest ship to the west coast of Ireland, then transmitted by telegraph from there to London. Clearly, the assassination of a head of state was dramatic enough, but so much more so because it occurred after the end of the American Civil War. Lincoln was a man who was imagined to have freed America’s enslaved people, and who’d worked his way up, with no formal education – a kind of working-class hero. So big public meetings were held in Hyde Park in London, and in cities all around the world, reflecting a genuine sense of shock and trauma. Just over 16 years later, President James A Garfield was shot. He didn’t die immediately, but lingered on for several months. By then, the transatlantic telegraph system had become effective, so his was the first US presidential assassination to be experienced in real time by Europeans and indeed by Americans around the rest of the country. Because it was an ongoing story, with bulletins issued from the president’s house, it was dragged out over a long period of time and became a global news phenomenon – as did the assassination of President William McKinley 20 years later. The assassination of John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963 was the first to be filmed, with footage taken by a bystander, Abraham Zapruder, made public some years after the shooting. As with so much about America, the world took notice – because everything about the US seems to take place on this massive, consequential scale. Various conspiracy theories surround Kennedy’s assassination. Is that fact linked to the international shock and the global scale of such events? It’s really difficult for people to accept that events that have huge consequences may have had tiny causes. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the idea that the life of this charismatic, glamorous young president – a hugely consequential figure in the context of the Cold War – could be cut short, that the US and the world could be robbed of his life and his leadership, struck people as a deeply upsetting, outrageous blow. So the idea that the cause of that blow could be one disaffected man, Lee Harvey Oswald, just didn’t compute. The natural tendency is to think: well, something else is at work here. This must be the Cubans, the Russians, or maybe – and of course this became one of the most prominent Kennedy conspiracy theories – we’ve somehow done this to ourselves as Americans. Maybe it’s the FBI or some sinister group within what some on the right now call the ‘Deep State’. That reinforces a recurrent fear and anxiety in American politics: we cannot hold this thing together because there are those among us, potentially millions and millions of them, who are fundamentally opposed to what we are trying to do as real Americans, defenders of the revolution, lovers of freedom, or whatever it might be. That might be a sinister cadre in the ‘Deep State’; it might be millions of MAGA Trump supporters; it might be the ‘liberal elite’ supporting Kamala Harris – whatever it is, at any given moment the stakes feel so high. So people look for conspiratorial, big picture explanations. What were the impacts of the attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan? On 30 March 1981, Ronald Reagan was approaching his limousine after delivering a speech in Washington DC when he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. The president was rushed by the secret service to a hospital, where he underwent surgery; the bullet was removed and he recovered. It was obviously a very dramatic and distressing moment – and one that Reagan brilliantly turned to his advantage. Stories circulated that as he was on the operating table, just before the anaesthetic took effect, he looked at the doctors and, with his trademark chuckle, said: “I hope you guys are all Republicans.” One of the doctors reportedly responded: “Today, Mr President, we’re all Republicans” – which of course was a great line to spin out. When he was giving a speech a few years later, a balloon popped nearby – and, without missing a beat, Reagan said: “Missed me.” Reagan was a great showman, like Donald Trump is a great showman, and he made great political capital out of this attempt on his life and the sangfroid with which he’d responded. Do you think that there is a direct relationship between political discourse and political violence, and are there examples that demonstrate that point? In a way, this gets to the heart of the problem. Is there a direct relationship? No. Is there a relationship? Yes, there surely must be. So does this explain what the shooter was doing in Pennsylvania on 13 July? In this case, of course, we will probably never know his motivations. However, plenty of Republicans have said that this shooting was a direct consequence of Democrats warning that Donald Trump is an authoritarian, a fascist and so on, and that if he becomes president, American democracy is on the line. Therefore, by implication, he must be stopped at all costs. Does it more broadly explain not just why this happened but why there was an attack on [former speaker of the House of Representatives] Nancy Pelosi’s husband; why there was an attempted kidnapping of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer; why two congressmen have been shot in the past 10 or 15 years; why we see a lot of violence around the edges of political rallies; why we see pushing and shoving of press representatives; why we see frequent threats of violence to American politicians? At the moment, American politics is intensely polarised. It’s partisan in a way that is just not true in Britain at the moment, and wasn’t true in the US through the 1960s and even into the nineties, but that has been true in the US in the past. I think that, though there is no direct relationship between political violence and polarisation, it’s clear that when you have a highly polarised polity, when people are driven to the point of believing that so much is at stake if the other side wins, then it’s not really so surprising when these kinds of attacks happen. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump, President Biden said: “The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.” Do you think that the US has a problem with recognising the violence in its history? The idea that this is somehow sort of un-American is palpably ridiculous. Violence and American politics have gone hand in hand right from the beginning, and some of this – perhaps quite a lot of it – is not just to do with the polarisation of politics, which is periodic, but to do with the massive availability of guns. In a country where there are more guns than there are people, where it’s extraordinarily easy to get hold of firearms, clearly this kind of assassination attempt is far more likely than it otherwise would be. Adam IP Smith is Edward Orsborn professor of United States politics & political history at the University of Oxford. He is also the host of The Last Best Hope? podcast This article first appeared in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Crime fiction history: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
From Hercule Poirot to Sherlock Holmes, Martin Edwards answers key questions on the history of the crime fiction genre
From Hercule Poirot to Sherlock Holmes, crime fiction has long been a popular genre. But what was the first crime novel? How has crime writing affected real-life cases? And what was the 'Detection Club'? In this 'everything you wanted to know' episode, Isabel King is joined by crime fiction author and researcher Martin Edwards to discuss the history of the influential genre.
Britain and the Caribbean: from slavery to Black Lives Matter
Imaobong Umoren argues that we need to take a longer view of British involvement in the Caribbean
Histories of British involvement in the Caribbean tend to focus mainly on the period of plantation slavery but, in her new book Empire Without End, Imaobong Umoren argues that we need to take a broader view. It's only by taking the story back to the 16th century and forward until the present, she contends, that we can fully understand the intertwining themes of colonialism and racism in the region – and see how they connect to events in Britain. In this episode, Imaobong explores these ideas in conversation with Rob Attar. Imaobong Umoren is the author of Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean (Fern Press, 2025). Buy it now from Waterstones
Tariffs and trade wars: a history of economic warfare
Frank Trentmann explores the long history of economic warfare and considers whether today's tariffs are as historically unprecedented as we might think
Trade wars and tariffs have once again been making headlines in recent weeks, as US president Donald Trump's government adopts combative economic policies. But are such approaches really that unusual? Speaking to Matt Elton, Frank Trentmann looks back at centuries of economic warfare – and reveals the historical factors that have sparked it.
Trump's tariffs: “They are dramatic only if you have a short historical memory”
Tariffs and trade wars have hit the headlines in recent months as US president Donald Trump pursues aggressive economic policies. But are they really so unprecedented? Frank Trentmann spoke to Matt Elton about centuries of ‘discriminatory taxes’
Matt Elton: Which historical precedents sprung to mind when you were reading the news about high tariffs being imposed by the US on imports of commodities such as steel and aluminium? Frank Trentmann: States have always tried to control what comes in and goes out. But it’s probably worth mentioning, in the current context, that a tariff was one of the first-ever acts of Congress passed by the United States in the late 18th century, mainly as a way to bring money into its coffers. And that’s one of the key points we should make about tariffs: although we tend to refer to them generically, they can have many different functions. One is raising revenue; another is to keep out foreign competition to benefit producers at home; yet another is as a negotiating tool, to improve trade or political relations. The big problem we can see from history is that you can’t achieve those three goals simultaneously because they cancel out one another. So nations have come up with a range of different ways to try to reconcile those three aims and to maximise how well they work. Is it true that, despite variations in form designed to balance those three objectives, tariffs are always taxes imposed on goods and services? It’s important to make the point that a tariff is a discriminatory tax, to distinguish it from a regular revenue duty, which is not set out to be discriminatory. Britain in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, for instance, was a free-trade country which had revenue duties – for example, on beer – but these applied to domestic beer as well as foreign beer. They are so-called excise duties. Tariffs only target foreign imports, with the specific purpose of giving home producers an advantage over foreign producers trying to sell their goods in your market, which it penalises. So that’s a big distinction. When we chart how tariffs have been applied, and trade wars have kicked off, throughout the centuries, does it tell us anything to look at the changing nature of the goods involved? If we take a very broad historical view, the biggest group of interests was the farming lobby – the people who grew the food. The purpose of the British Corn Laws [in force from 1815 to 1846], for instance, was to keep out cheaper foreign wheat, maize and rye to protect and, in a way, subsidise farmers at home. It’s obviously the case that, after the industrial revolution, manufactured goods became much more important – so ultimately, the levers are being pulled where the wealth is being created and around which goods the powerful interests are crying out for protection. Having said that, it’s worth noting that the European Union, in 2018, responded to US tariffs on steel by raising its own tariffs on American food and bourbon, as well as on Harley-Davidson motorbikes. As we speak, the EU is again planning to retaliate against President Trump’s most recent tariff on steel by hitting back on US poultry, beef and bourbon, as well as steel. And it’s also worth remembering that food – in particular, wheat – remains absolutely crucial for survival. In the early 20th century, for instance, there were still major economic conflicts over wheat and pork in continental Europe. Austria-Hungary started a ‘pig war’ with Serbia in 1906, trying (unsuccessfully) to completely block its pork imports. The current situation is still very far from those dramatic episodes. Free Traders at the time, of course, pointed out that an ‘open door’ policy was the best way to secure abundant, cheap food. That is true in peace time. But if your cheap food comes from another country that is hostile or pursues its own interests, that leaves your population extremely vulnerable. The other thing we need to add into this picture is that, historically, states were much smaller. In terms of economic and social activity, before the 20th century the state was quite limited, which also meant that tax systems were relatively simple compared with those of today. Income tax was only being introduced by most European countries from the 1890s, so taxes on goods and imports were a very important part of state revenue. Fast-forward to the second half of the 20th century, and most states had stopped relying on tariffs or import duties for their revenue – they had income tax, inheritance tax, capital tax, VAT and so on. So, relatively speaking, tariffs are more marginal from a fiscal and economic point of view than they used to be 100 or 200 years ago. So is the current spate of high tariffs something of a historical outlier? Not if we take a view of modern political economy across 200 years. For most of that time, the US was protectionist [shielding its domestic economy by taxing imports] – indeed, more protectionist than anything Trump is currently suggesting. When the Republican William McKinley became president in 1897, for instance, his tariffs were almost twice as high as Trump’s, and applied to a much wider range of goods. Similarly, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act – which implemented blanket high tariffs on thousands of imported goods coming into the United States – was punitively onerous, and was criticised by hundreds of economists. Compared with that, we’re now in a much milder climate. What’s also true, though, is that the stunned and agitated reactions we’ve seen in some quarters to these new tariffs are caused by the fact that they come after 70 years of trade liberalisation. In 1947, an international architecture of trade known as the GATT – the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade – was established. This body evolved into its current form, the World Trade Organization (WTO), in 1995. In those postwar years, the US played a crucial role in liberalising trade relations. Tariff levels kept falling throughout the 1950s and 60s, continuing all the way into the 2000s. It was really only in 2017, when globalisation turned backwards into deglobalisation and the first tariff and trade war between the US and China broke out, that the trend was reversed. In short, if you have a short historical memory, what Trump has been doing in recent weeks does seem pretty dramatic – because it turns around the story that people had become used to across the past 70 years. But if you take a longer view of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, all of this is perhaps a little bit less extreme than many people think. In that case, is it more accurate to view the seven-decade period from the mid-20th century as the historical anomaly? Yes – though there were actually two long periods that were peculiar and exceptional. One was the mid-Victorian era, when ‘Britain ruled the waves’ and was the most dominant political and economic power on the planet. During that era, Britain initiated trade liberalisation through trade treaties, which triggered a series of further treaties; over time, more and more European nations adopted what was called the ‘most favoured nation clause’. Effectively, that meant that a nation provided equal terms to all its trade partners. If a country gave preferential treatment to one trading partner (for instance by agreeing to lower its tariffs), it must automatically extend that same treatment to all other countries with most-favoured nation status. It had a cascading effect and liberalised trade. But then came the first big world depression, which started in 1873, and tariffs began to rise again. The other exceptional period, which we’ve already discussed, came just after the Second World War, when the US effectively stepped into the shoes of the British empire to become the global economic, political and military superpower. It advanced and pushed through trade liberalisation, both during the Cold War and afterwards. What’s obviously notable about both of those periods is that they featured a single dominant global power. As everyone reading this will appreciate, throughout the past decade we have moved further and further away from that situation of hegemony. The global system, with the rise of China and the continuing resilience of Russia, is now multi-polar, increasingly torn between rival competing great powers. In a sense, then, is it right to see tariffs as a symptom of that global historical shift? I think so, and I also think we need to get away from seeing tariffs only in economic terms – because for Trump, they are much more than that. They are an integral part of a wider territorial view – that the American economy is the land of the United States and the resources, raw materials and the people in that land. In this territorial conception, trade exchange is not seen as mutually beneficial but instead a system in which there is always a winner and a loser. The interesting thing to add here is that we shouldn’t see this as an intrinsically American perspective, because the person who probably had the greatest influence in spreading protectionist ideas was a German: Friedrich List, an entrepreneur and economist who was persecuted by his homeland, the kingdom of Württemberg, and who fled into exile to the US in 1825 for criticising the government. He went on to support the protectionist campaign in US politics, and criticised liberal British economists and thinkers who argued for the mutual benefits of trade. List’s argument was that two trading nations were rarely equal, and that the stronger nation would use trade to advance its interests – so a nation that was the smaller, weaker partner in this relationship would end up at a disadvantage permanently. Weaker countries, therefore, should protect their ‘infant industries’ so that they could grow to full strength. List’s national economic view became a widespread international conception of how the economy works, and the way in which economic development is tightly related to national strength and security. So should we avoid seeing the story of tariffs and trade wars as emblematic of the US and its history? Well, consider another aspect of William McKinley’s story. He introduced a very aggressive regime of tariffs when he came to power – but, a few days before he was assassinated in 1901, he had a bit of a rethink and came to the conclusion that, actually, tariffs didn’t work as well as he’d thought. He planned to wind them back – but was shot before he could do so. I’d highlight that back and forth between a protectionist and a commercial vision as a key part of American history. Everyone knows the story of the Boston Tea Party [of December 1773]: how the Patriots, in their fight for independence from the British empire, sponsored a view of economic nationalism. They were all for making and wearing homespun local goods and abstaining from foreign imports, including the tea that got dumped into the harbour. So there’s one conception of the American Republic that is very territorial and aims to be as self-sufficient as possible, and another that sees trade as mutually beneficial and closer to the liberal economic thinking that’s often held sway in Britain and Europe. Those two viewpoints have always been in conflict: in the 1920s and early 1930s, for instance, the United States shifted dramatically to the protectionist side, but then, in the 1930s and early 1940s under Franklin D Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, the nation shifted back towards trade liberalisation. Boston Tea Party: Igniting a Revolution Member exclusive | Discover the causes, tensions, and violent origins of the Boston Tea Party. Join leading experts as they explain the key players involved in the plan – and why tea was so important to the story. Listen to all episodes now It’s so interesting that, amid these huge economic and historical sweeps, there was an ongoing push and pull of intellectual ideas between individuals operating on an international stage. Yes, it is. These are not anonymous forces we’re talking about here, and they’re not just economic interests, either. For a really long time, from the late 18th to the early 20th century, the question of tariffs and free trade was a big political issue. Entire social movements, and many marginal and excluded groups, organised around them. In Britain, it was the issue that first prompted women’s groups to hold big public political meetings. The Women’s Cooperative Guild was the first independent political lobby group by women for women, and the defence of free trade and defeat of tariffs was really core to its feminist politics. That’s because tariffs have political consequences – they benefit powerful lobbies and groups – so democratic defenders of free trade made the point that what was really at stake was an open, transparent and accountable democratic system. If you have tariffs, then those powerful lobbies are likely to try to use parliament to arrange them in a way that benefits them, at the expense of consumers. Finally, are there other recent shifts in the story of trade wars and tariffs that help illuminate the current situation? I think that they occupy a different place in the political imagination compared with the early 20th century. That period saw enormous popular political conflicts break out over the subject of tariffs – not just in Britain, but also in places such as imperial Germany, where major upheavals were caused by proposed tariffs on goods including meat. That’s because, as well as being in some cases a life-or-death issue, provision of these goods was also seen as fundamental for the strength of the entire nation. We’re in a different world now. Yes, the latest round of tariffs has made the headlines. But it’s not as if consumers are out in the streets in mass demonstrations as a result. So a key thing to appreciate is that, across the past 100 years, issues of tariffs and free trade have for many people lost their political salience. We might not like it if the price of eggs goes up, but it’s no longer a question of political identity or something that pushes people on to the barricades. Why is that the case? Well, as I mentioned, the state has been transformed over the past century to become a much larger entity. Many states now have social security systems which mean that increases in the price of bread, for example, are no longer a matter of life or death, because the state cushions and absorbs the impact of that increase to a degree. And, for the state itself, tariffs are not that big a deal because it has other sources of revenue. But another key thing that’s happened is that, after 1945, trade politics moved out of the local sphere and into the supranational. Trade liberalisation is now largely discussed behind closed doors by experts and bureaucrats in organisations such as the WTO, and is no longer really part of popular political culture. Big protests do still happen outside the meetings of powerful nations – in Genoa [by anti-globalisation campaigners at the G8 summit in 2011], for instance. These aren’t insignificant – but they’re no longer part of mainstream politics.
Blue Fugates: the rare blood disorder that turned the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ blue
The name sounds like an old folk legend, or the title of a sci-fi story, but for the generations of isolated families in eastern Kentucky, the phrase ‘feeling blue’ had a very literal meaning
Anyone who strayed into the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly around an area known as Troublesome Creek, might have come across a close-knit cluster of families. Here, there would have been plenty of people with surnames like Fugate, Smith, Combs, Ritchie and Stacy. Not that they would not have been difficult to spot: as their nickname the ‘Blue People of Kentucky’ suggests, there was a good chance they had blue skin. Who were the Blue People of Kentucky? The origins of the Blue People of Kentucky go back to 1820, when a French immigrant named Martin Fugate came to the United States. Settling at Troublesome Creek, he married an American woman, Elizabeth Smith, and together they had seven children. Imagine their shock, however, when four of them were born blue. There were no obvious health concerns and, otherwise, they developed normally. Yet they remained head-to-toe indigo for the rest of their lives. That could have been the end of the story, were it not for the remoteness of the region. It did not exactly attract a diverse wave of settlers willing to make the difficult journey and endure the inhospitality there once they did. That meant that marriage and inbreeding between a small number of families became common practice. Considering the shallow gene pool, it might come as no surprise that each new generation welcomed more blue members. Read more | Why were people of noble birth said to be ‘blue blooded’? It was only in 1960 – 140 years after Martin Fugate came to the US – that the strange condition became the subject of medical investigation. That was thanks to the efforts of a young haematologist at the University of Kentucky, Dr Madison Cawein, and a nurse named Ruth Pendergrass. The problem would be to find one of the Blue People, with Troublesome Creek many hours away from Cawein’s base at the university. Then one day out of the blue, as it were, two blue-skinned siblings, Rachel and Patrick Ritchie, just happened to walk into the heart clinic where Pendergrass worked. Why were the Blue People of Kentucky blue? Since the blue-tinged families had no health issues – and had relatives who had lived to ripe old ages – Cawein suspected a rare blood disorder called methemoglobinemia, which affects how oxygen gets around the body. Essentially, there is not enough of a particular enzyme that turns methaemoglobin into oxygen-carrying haemoglobin. By the slimmest of chances, both Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith carried the recessive gene. The average person has less than one per cent of methaemoglobin in their blood; the Blue People of Kentucky had between 10 and 20 per cent. While not enough to be harmful, the disorder turned their blood a deep brown colour and gave their skin its blueish hue. The decades of inbreeding then let the disorder flourish. Oddly enough, the treatment that Cawein devised to get rid of the blue skin was to put blue dye into the body. Within a matter of minutes of injecting Methylene Blue, which balanced out the methaemoglobin, the Ritchies’ skin began to turn pink. Tablets were then sufficient to keep the blue tinge at bay. Who was the last Blue Person of Kentucky? Gradually, the Blue People clan diminished, although there was one last appearance in 1975 when Benjamin ‘Benjy’ Stacy’ was born with purplish skin. The boy, doctors were relieved to find out, was a descendent of Martin Fugate, and his skin eventually turned to a regular colour. That said, whenever Benjy got upset, angry or cold, his lips and digits would temporarily turn blue – a remaining link to his peculiar family heritage.