McKee Library - Research Guides at Southern Adventist University

Thanksgiving in the United States is a day to celebrate and give thanks over a feast that dates back to the early meal shared by Pilgrims and Native Americans at Plymouth in 1621. Yet, many of the ideas we have about this first meal are inaccurate. We invite you to explore the resources below to learn more about our country's history and the first Thanksgiving.

Research Guides

Colonial America: First Thanksgiving
Learn more about life in colonial American, including the first thanksgiving, on this research topic guide.

Exploration of America: Native Americans and the Early Explorers
This guide contains information on McKee Library's collection of resources relating to the discovery of America, including recommended books for further reading, films, research, databases, reference works, and more.

Native Americans: History, Culture, & Tribes
This guide covers the history and culture of Native American tribes. This guide is an ongoing project. As such, additional content will be added throughout the academic year.

Books

This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman

Call Number: E99.W2 S545 2019

ISBN: 9781632869241

Publication Date: 2020-04-16

Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony's founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story. In March 1621, when Plymouth's survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth's governor, John Carver, declared their people's friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the "First Thanksgiving." The treaty remained operative until King Philip's War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end. This Land is Their Land shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, tell the history of Thanksgiving.

The First Thanksgiving by Robert Tracy McKenzie

Call Number: GT4975 .M44 2013

ISBN: 9780830825745

Publication Date: 2013-08-01

Foreword Book of the Year Award Finalist The Pilgrims' celebration of the first Thanksgiving is a keystone of America's national and spiritual identity. But is what we've been taught about them or their harvest feast what actually happened? And if not, what difference does it make? Through the captivating story of the birth of this quintessentially American holiday, veteran historian Tracy McKenzie helps us to better understand the tale of America's origins--and for Christians, to grasp the significance of this story and those like it. McKenzie avoids both idolizing and demonizing the Pilgrims, and calls us to love and learn from our flawed yet fascinating forebears. The First Thanksgiving is narrative history at its best, and promises to be an indispensable guide to the interplay of historical thinking and Christian reflection on the meaning of the past for the present.

Squanto's Journey by Joseph Bruchac; Greg Shed (Illustrator)

Call Number: Juvenile ; Easy B8878sq

ISBN: 9780152060442

Publication Date: 2007-09-01

In 1620 an English ship called the Mayflower landed on the shores inhabited by the Pokanoket, and it was Squanto who welcomed the newcomers and taught them how to survive. When a good harvest was gathered, the people feasted together--a tradition that continues almost four hundred years later.

1621: a New Look at Thanksgiving by Catherine Grace

Call Number: GT4975 .G72 2004

ISBN: 9780792261391

Publication Date: 2004-10-01

Countering the prevailing, traditional story of the first Thanksgiving, with its black-hatted, silver-buckled Pilgrims; blanket-clad, be-feathered Indians; cranberry sauce; pumpkin pie; and turkey, this lushly illustrated photo-essay presents a more measured, balanced, and historically accurate version of the three-day harvest celebration in 1621.

Streaming Films

First Thanksgiving - Segment from After the Mayflower
As the "thanks-giving" began, a group of Wampanoag men led by their Chief, Massasoit, entered the Plymouth settlement with five fresh-killed deer--just some of the vitals for a celebration that stretched over the next three days. Distributed by PBS Distribution.

When is Thanksgiving? Colonizing America: Crash Course US History #2

In which John Green teaches you about the (English) colonies in what is now the United States. He covers the first permanent English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, the various theocracies in Massachusetts, the feudal kingdom in Maryland, and even a bit about the spooky lost colony at Roanoke Island. What were the English doing in America, anyway?

Recent Posts

McKee Library's Christmas Hours 2025

McKee Library will close at 5 pm on Thursday, December 18. We will be open limited hours January 5-8. Regular hours will resume on Monday, January 12, 2026....

Thanksgiving Break at McKee Library 2025

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Celebrate Native American Heritage Month This November

Join us in honoring Native American Heritage Month, celebrated each year in November. Discover stories that highlight the rich contributions and diverse voices of Native American authors. McKee Library warmly invites you to explore our display on the library’s main floor featuring a curated selection of books. We invite you to explore the titles below, as well as our Native Americans: History, Culture, & Tribes: Native American Heritage research guide, to explore the history and culture of Native American tribes. An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo Call Number: PS3558.A62423 A64 2020ISBN: 0393358488Publication Date: 2020-08-18National Bestseller A stunning new volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, informed by her tribal history and connection to the land. In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family's lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. A descendent of storytellers and "one of our finest--and most complicated--poets" (Los Angeles Review of Books), Joy Harjo continues her legacy with this latest powerful collection. This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman Call Number: E99.W2 S545 2019ISBN: 9781632869241Publication Date: 2019-11-05Ahead of the 400th Anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony's founding events, told for the first time from the perspective of the Wampanoag natives. In March 1621, when Plymouth's survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief) Ousamequin (Massasoit) and Plymouth's governor John Carver declared their people's friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousmaequin and ninety of his men then visited Plymouth for the "First Thanksgiving." The treaty remained operative until King Philip's War in 1675, when fifty years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end. 400 years after that famous meal, historian David J. Silverman sheds a profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. From the vantage of the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted long after the devastating war tracing the Wampanoags' ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day. This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a holiday which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white proprietorship of the United States. No Reason to Give Thanks shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, tell the history of Thanksgiving. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne Call Number: E99 .C85 P3835 2010ISBN: 1416591052Publication Date: 2010-05-25Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all. S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specifically designed to fight them: the six-gun. The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne's exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads--a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being. Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower-blue eyes who was kidnapped by Comanches from the far Texas frontier in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the "White Squaw" who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend. S. C. Gwynne's account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history. Unworthy Republic by Claudio Saunt Call Number: E98.R4 S38 2020ISBN: 0393609847Publication Date: 2020-03-24In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Unworthy Republic reveals how expulsion became national policy and describes the chaotic and deadly results of the operation to deport 80,000 men, women, and children.Drawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunt's deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in U.S. expansion across the continent. Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the southern states. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many U.S. citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nation's values. When Congress passed the act by a razor-thin margin, it authorized one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States.In telling this gripping story, Saunt shows how the politics and economics of white supremacy lay at the heart of the expulsion of Native Americans; how corruption, greed, and administrative indifference and incompetence contributed to the debacle of its implementation; and how the consequences still resonate today. The Heart of Everything That Is by Bob Drury; Tom Clavin Call Number: E99 .O3 R3725 2013ISBN: 1451654669Publication Date: 2013-11-05NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An astonishing untold story of the American West The great Sioux warrior-statesman Red Cloud was the only American Indian in history to defeat the United States Army in a war, forcing the government to sue for peace on his terms. At the peak of Red Cloud's powers the Sioux could claim control of one-fifth of the contiguous United States and the loyalty of thousands of fierce fighters. But the fog of history has left Red Cloud strangely obscured. Now, thanks to the rediscovery of a lost autobiography, and painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of our nation's most powerful and successful Indian warrior can finally be told. Born in 1821 near the Platte River in modern-day Nebraska, Red Cloud lived an epic life of courage, wisdom, and fortitude in the face of a relentless enemy--the soldiers and settlers who represented the "manifest destiny" of an expanding America. He grew up an orphan and had to overcome numerous social disadvantages to advance in Sioux culture. Red Cloud did that by being the best fighter, strategist, and leader of his fellow warriors. As the white man pushed farther and farther west, they stole the Indians' land, slaughtered the venerated buffalo, and murdered with impunity anyone who resisted their intrusions. The final straw for Red Cloud and his warriors was the U.S. government's frenzied spate of fort building throughout the pristine Powder River Country that abutted the Sioux's sacred Black Hills--Paha Sapa to the Sioux, or "The Heart of Everything That Is." The result was a gathering of angry tribes under one powerful leader. "The white man lies and steals," Red Cloud told his thousands of braves at council fire. "My lodges were many, now they are few. The white man wants all. They must fight for it." What came to be known as Red Cloud's War (1866-1868) culminated in a massacre of American cavalry troops that presaged the Little Bighorn and served warning to Washington that the Plains Indians would fight, and die, for their land and traditions. But many more American soldiers would die first. In The Heart of Everything That Is, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, the New York Times bestselling authors of Halsey's Typhoon and The Last Stand of Fox Company, restore Red Cloud to his rightful place in American history in a sweeping and dramatic narrative based on years of primary research. As they trace the events leading to Red Cloud's War they provide intimate portraits of the many and various men and women whose lives Red Cloud touched--mountain men such as the larger-than-life Jim Bridger; U.S. generals like William Tecumseh Sherman who were charged with annihilating the Sioux; fearless explorers such as the dashing John Bozeman; and the warriors whom Red Cloud groomed, the legendary Crazy Horse in particular. And residing at the heart of the story is Red Cloud, fighting for the very existence of the Indian way of life. This fiery narrative, fueled by contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, eyewitness accounts, and meticulous firsthand sourcing, is a stirring chronicle of the conflict between an expanding white civilization and the Plains Indians who stood in its way. The Heart of Everything That Is not only places the reader at the center of this remarkable epoch, but finally gives Red Cloud the modern-day recognition he deserves. The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk Call Number: E77 .B64 2023ISBN: 9780300244052Publication Date: 2023-04-25National Bestseller Winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction * Finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Award in History * Winner of 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction * Winner of the 2024 Mark Lynton History Prize Named a best book of 2023 by New Yorker, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 * A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction of 2023 * An NPR "Book We Love" for 2023 "Eloquent and comprehensive. . . . In the book's sweeping synthesis, standard flashpoints of U.S. history take on new meaning."--Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal "In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental--either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk . . . [shows] that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along."--Washington Post Book World, "Books to Read in 2023" A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that * European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; * Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; * the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; * California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; * the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; * twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk's retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America. Living Nations, Living Words by Joy Harjo (Editor); Carla D. Hayden (Foreword by); The Library of Congress (As told to) Call Number: PS591.I55 L56 2021ISBN: 9780393867916Publication Date: 2021-05-04Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project-including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others-to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship." In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering....

Celebrate National Book Month

October marks National Book Month. What could be better than commemorating it with a book from McKee Library? If you prefer audiobooks, don’t miss our expanding collection available on Libby (formerly OverDrive). Whether you're a fan of fiction, non-fiction, or anything in between, there’s something for everyone to enjoy. Dive into a classic novel or learn something new with a non-fiction bestseller.We invite students to participate in our National Book Month Passport to Reading challenge. Complete five simple tasks for a chance to win prizes. Passports can be picked up at McKee Library and must be completed by October 30 at noon for your chance to win. Prizes will be awarded as the challenge is completed and while supplies last. Please contact Jessica Spears with any questions....

The First Thanksgiving

Research Guides

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The First Thanksgiving

Research Guides

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Streaming Films

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