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Thanksgiving

How do your students understand Thanksgiving? Where do their views on the holiday come from? In this lesson plan, students share what they've been taught about Thanksgiving, and then compare a set of very different modern viewpoints on the holiday. FIND OUT MORE »

Learning Resources

Explore what's known about early contact

The Origins of Thanksgiving

Screencap, The Origins of Thanksgiving

Introduce your students to the history of Thanksgiving with this short video. [...] »

Mass Moments

Coast Guard plane landed at Children's beach, 1926

MA educators—explore a historical moment (and accompanying primary source [...] »

The Pilgrims in American Culture: Thanksgiving

Photograph, The Wampanoag People: Fish, You Are the Historian: Investigating...

Were the Pilgrims really shorter than us? Discover the answer to all your [...] »

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Teaching Resources

Adopt strategies for analyzing the holiday

Jennifer Orr on Teaching Thanksgiving

Photo, Kindergarten Thanksgiving Feast-9, Barrett Web Coordinator, Flickr

How do you broach the complicated issues surrounding Thanksgiving with early [...] »

What Really Happened? Comparing Stories of the First Thanksgiving

Postcard, Thanksgiving greetings, P. Sander, New York Public Library

Take a variety of perspectives into account before moving past the first [...] »

Confronting the "Official Story" of American History

Photo, George Washington, August 26, 2008, cliff1066tm, Flickr

Can students learn history through themes that don’t fit the usual approach to [...] »

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Quizzes

Test your Thanksgiving knowledge!

Thanksgiving: Presidential Turkeys

Postcard, 1910, Ault & Wiborg Printing Ink Company

How many turkeys have presidents pardoned? [...] »

Thanksgiving Dinner in 1943

Postcard, Thanksgiving day, 1907, Raphael Tuck and Sons, NYPL

What traditional Thanksgiving foods would have been hard to come by during WWII? [...] »

Turkey Tracking

Magazine cover, Harper's Bazaar--Thanksgiving 1894, 1894, Louis Rhead, LoC

Thanksgiving—how much do you know about the history of this popular [...] »

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