We hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving yesterday and continue to enjoy spending time with friends and family today. While we at The Heritage Foundation enjoy our holiday, we invite you to read President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation below. The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature …
Most of us have heard or read at least part of Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation at some point. But even those who have heard it many times can overlook two important aspects of this important document. The first is its timing: October 3, 1863. The nation had already endured two years of appalling carnage on the battlefields of the Civil War. And although Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg seemed to mark a turning point in favor of the Union, there was no clear light at the end of the …
This Thursday, millions of families will celebrate Thanksgiving with roasted turkey, buttery mashed potatoes, and (with only a slight amount of guilt) another piece of pumpkin pie. But in early America, days of Thanksgiving weren’t always about food. Reflecting American religious practice, Presidents and Congresses from the beginning of the republic have from time to time designated days of fasting and thanksgiving (the Thanksgiving holiday we continue to celebrate on the third Thursday of November was established by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War). Following a resolution of Congress, President …
Churches will be aglow on Thanksgiving as families gather to express their gratitude for the blessings they’ve experienced. Their continuing presence in the pews would bode well for our nation as well, given that decades of sociological studies have documented the relationship between church attendance and charitable giving, volunteerism, and civic involvement. In a comprehensive study of charity in America, Who Really Cares, American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks found that those who attend church weekly are more likely to donate money to a charitable cause than peers who seldom …
This week is a time of giving thanks, and one of the most treasured gifts for which many Americans are thankful is freedom. In the West, freedom lies at the center of an inherited tradition that goes by the name “liberal,” from the Latin liber, meaning “free.” To sustain genuine freedom, we bear the responsibility of understanding the roots of this tradition and preserving it from error, perversion, and decay. Today in Washington, D.C., the word liberal carries connotations of big government and left-leaning political ideology. The same is probably …
This Thanksgiving, American families will gather around plump turkeys and homemade stuffing to share good food and good conversation with loved ones and family members. The benefits of the quality time families spend together over the Thanksgiving feast can go well beyond the last slice of pumpkin pie. As a brand new chart on Heritage’s FamilyFacts.org shows, sharing meals with family members can mean much more than full stomachs and plentiful leftovers. Teens who eat dinner five or more times per week with their families are at least half as …
Many of us will give thanks for family this week. Sadly, more than one hundred thousand children awaiting adoption from the foster care system don’t have a family to be thankful for. More than 400,000 children are in the foster care system, and about a quarter are in circumstances that will prevent them from being reunified with their family of origin. They need adoptive homes. November is National Adoption Month, and this year’s initiative aims to find permanent parents for these 107,000 foster children. That’s a call advocates of limited …
Americans really are blessed. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and most of us are free to approach it as we please: Gathering once again as family and friends to enjoy favorite food and company, we may choose to thank God for all we have. We may just dig into the turkey and trimmings with a general sense of gratitude for our lives. Or we may face Thanksgiving like just about any other holiday from work — except with more football games and parades. The local religion sheriff doesn’t check to make sure …
We hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving Holiday yesterday and continue to enjoy spending time with friends and family today. The Heritage Foundation will be posting on The Foundry throughout this Friday so please check back frequently. Till then, do enjoy President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation below. The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been …
Between football and pumpkin pie, take a few minutes today to learn about the history of Thanksgiving in America. In this week’s Heritage in Focus podcast, Assistant Director of the Center for American Studies David Azerrad discusses the history and meaning of Thanksgiving in America’s uniquely free and religious society. David Weinberger hosts. Listen here. To get regular updates on Heritage in Focus podcasts, visit our RSS feed or subscribe on iTunes.
