Pod Only Knows #015 – Unraveling the Thanksgiving Myth – with Dr. David J. Silverman
What better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than to have Kelly and John ruin it for you?
Just kidding! We’re not here to cancel Thanksgiving and we hope you have a lovely one.
But holidays are weird things – we often celebrate them without really examining why, or how we arrived at the myths and rituals that emanate from their core.
And Thanksgiving is, in many ways, our strangest holiday – a secular celebration that is at once also an aggressively religious one, built around a series of supposedly historical events that seem to have a lot of missing pieces when you start connecting the dots.
It can also be a day that evokes painful memories for the indigenous population.
To help us unpack what Thanksgiving is and what it is not, and to shed some light on how we came to celebrate this holiday as well as how important it is that we not let that celebration obscure our understanding of early American history and the genocide of the indigenous population, we asked historian David J. Silverman – author of This Land is Their Land – to join us.
You can buy Dr. Silverman’s book here: This Land is Their Land @ Amazon
Read also Dr. Silverman’s 2019 piece in The New York Times: The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth
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