HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-11-26T17:20:32.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Think you know everything about the history of Thanksgiving? Here’s 21 facts that will prove you wrong
items: Why is the shopping day after Thanksgiving called ‘Black Friday’?
items: A brief history of turkeys, plus why we eat a turkey dinner at Christmas
items: A brief history of Thanksgiving
items: America: Brave new world or accident?

Think you know everything about the history of Thanksgiving? Here’s 21 facts that will prove you wrong
type: item
date: 2025-11-26T15:03:54.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: General Modern
subject: Period
subject: Thanksgiving
description: 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
encoded: 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 i…

1GettyImages-566417501-d453d79-e1764169741303.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1002

Why is the shopping day after Thanksgiving called ‘Black Friday’?
type: item
date: 2021-11-24T06:05:00.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Shopping
subject: Thanksgiving
description: On the shopping day known as 'Black Friday', millions descend on the shops to spy out the best bargains. How did the day get its name?
encoded: Black Friday has been adopted as the unofficial opening to the Christmas shopping period. It all began in the United States as a day of ‘doorbuster’ sales the day after Thanksgiving but increasingly, Britain is getting into the swing of things – sometimes literally, as brawls and all-out fights are quite common among scrapping shoppers. Retailers love the day of discounts as billions are spent within a matter of hours, but there is one organisation for whom the day brings nothing but despair: the police. Read more | A brief history of shopping In 1966, the Philadelphia Police Department grew so frustrated by the congested streets, traffic jams and regular tussles that, it's believed, they coined the name ‘Black Friday’ in the hope of dissuading people from heading to the shops. It completely failed, but the name stuck. Understandably, retailers weren’t keen on the name – it had strong associations with the Great Depression of the 1930s, signalled by Black Thursday – so they tried to reinvent the image of the Black Friday frenzy. The ‘black’, it was argued, referred to the ledgers used by retailers. For the majority of the year, shops would be ‘in the red’ (losing money) but Black Friday indicated the moment when most retailers would start making a profit, or going ‘in the black’. So that is how Black Friday got its name. There is no evidence to the regularly espoused theory that it went back to a 19th century tradition when slave owners would sell their weak or elderly slaves at low prices. Fortunately, that story is purely apocryphal. This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine

74.-GettyImages-912541018-a24b87a-e1669202154842.jpg
width: 620
height: 412

A brief history of turkeys, plus why we eat a turkey dinner at Christmas
type: item
date: 2020-11-26T10:05:04.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Tudor
subject: Victorian
subject: Christmas
subject: Thanksgiving
description: How did turkeys come to Britain and when did we first start eating them? As 10 million homes across Britain prepare to tuck into one over the festive period, Julian Humphrys looks at the history of the bird that will never vote for Christmas
encoded: Where do turkeys come from? They’re native to the Americas. They got the name because when Europeans first came across them they incorrectly thought they were a form of African guinea fowl which, because they were imported into Europe from Turkey, were commonly known as turkey fowl. How did turkeys come to Britain? Britain probably obtained its first turkeys from the Spanish, who had brought the birds back to Europe after encountering them in the Aztec empire. However it’s possible that they were introduced by William Strickland, a Yorkshire merchant and MP who travelled to the New World in the 16th century. He certainly seems to have wanted to promote a link with the bird, as the family coat of arms, which was granted in about 1550, has a turkey as a crest. Read more | 6 Christmas party tips from the past When did Brits start eating them? Henry VIII is the first known English king to have eaten turkey. At that time the bird was seen as something of an exotic delicacy and would have been just one of a variety of fowl to be placed before the hungry monarch. One of the reasons for turkey’s appeal was that it was not only large enough to make a fine display on the table but also had tastier and less stringy flesh than that other exotic royal favourite, the peacock. For centuries the turkey was the preserve of the well-to-do and middle classes and it was only after the Second World War, when it became cheaper to rear, that the turkey became the population’s Christmas bird of choice. They're also the food of choice for Thanksgiving dinners in the USA. What was eaten before turkey? If a working-class family in the 19th century ate a bird, it was more likely to have been a goose, and Christmas ‘goose clubs’ were established to help them save up for it. Note how the poverty-stricken Swans, peacocks and boars’ heads graced aristocrats’ tables; more modest households made do with whatever seasonal fare they could find – chicken or goose, perhaps, or the odd pigeon. Bob Cratch…

Getty 3321974 kindle-3d8a116.jpg
width: 520
height: 370

A brief history of Thanksgiving
type: item
date: 2019-11-27T12:00:58.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Thanksgiving
description: Thanksgiving is a holiday about food – but, argues Professor Rachel B Herrmann, it is more specifically a holiday about food’s absence. From starvation to cannibalism, here she charts the history of Thanksgiving in America and considers the significance of the nation’s beloved turkey dinners and cranberry sauce…
encoded: In September 1620, after panicking about leaking ships and provisioning problems that had necessitated stops in Southampton, Dartmouth and Plymouth, the Pilgrims bid a final farewell to England. By November they had become grave-robbers. William Bradford, the future governor of the English colony of Plymouth on the east coast of North America, wrote one of the few surviving accounts of the voyage and life in present-day Massachusetts. It was published in the mid-19th century. Bradford was part of a group of families who believed that the Anglican Church could only be reformed from abroad, and had lived for over a decade in Leiden, Netherlands, before their voyage on the Mayflower to North America. Bradford described colonists’ anxieties before departure: the people worried that in this new situation, “they should be liable to famine and nakedness and the want, in a manner, of all things.” Their worries were coloured by history. The first permanent English colony in North America – in Jamestown, Virginia – had experienced a Starving Time from 1609–10, and as accusations and denials swirled in the early 1620s, it became clear that some Starving Time colonists had cannibalised Native Americans, and eaten each other. Read more | 7 facts you might not know about the history of Thanksgiving Perhaps these fears were why, during their first few weeks in the region that has come to be known as New England, colonists stole whatever edible items they could find. Historian Christopher Heaney explains that upon arrival in New England, English colonists found mounds of sand filled with mats, pots and Wampanoag weaponry, but said that they stopped digging once they realised that they had unearthed a Native American grave. This admission was a half-truth, because in fact the colonists kept digging once they discovered that some of the graves were filled with maize. For this bounty of “Indian baskets filled with corn”, Bradford thanked the“special providence of God”. The Christians’…

GettyImages-524921924-6773401-e1669201682406.jpg
width: 620
height: 412

America: Brave new world or accident?
type: item
date: 2019-04-05T12:00:23.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Stuart
subject: Thanksgiving
subject: Tudor exploration
description: Far from being a bold project to create a nation, early settlers to the US wanted nothing more than to survive – and to recreate England, according to Malcolm Gaskill...
encoded: Just before dawn on 29 February 1704, the Reverend John Williams was awoken by the sound of splintering wood and smashing glass. He was barely out of bed when 20 Native American warriors with painted faces and tomahawks appeared in his house. Williams aimed his pistol at the leading intruder, but it misfired and he was apprehended. The raid, a joint Franco-Native Indian operation, left 56 residents of Deerfield, a small township in north-western Massachusetts, dead in the snow. Among them were two of Williams’s eight children. Five of the others (one was away at school), together with Williams and his wife, were gathered into a group of more than 100 people and marched off into the freezing wastes, heading for Canada. Fear and privation, courage and fortitude framed lives and shaped identity on the New England frontier. Queen Anne’s War, a European conflict fought between France and England and transposed to North America, had been raging since 1702; it had been preceded by King William’s War in the 1690s and, 20 years earlier, Metacom’s War, which had threatened to wipe New England off the map. Captives, taken by the Native Americans to be enslaved or ransomed, survived almost unbelievable ordeals. John Williams’s wife was killed (for stumbling on the march), but he and his children were finally freed in November 1706 – though his 10-year-old daughter Eunice was forced to remain as the surrogate child of a Mohawk family. The following year, Williams published a book, The Redeemed Captive, one of numerous such accounts that made captivity a familiar trope in colonial history. Your guide to Alexander Hamilton, plus 6 fascinating facts about the founding father This story, and others like it, is well known. But we might ask a question that seems obvious but too often goes unasked: who were these frontiers folk, and what on Earth were they were doing there? How was their identity shaped and defined? At one level, the answer is simple: they were English migrants, and th…

Alamy AYX15G kindle-793c521.jpg
width: 520
height: 584