Thanksgiving@400

 

It's the quadricentennial, double what it was in the nation's bicentennial in 1976. But in many ways the quadricentennial is more meaningful than the bicentennial. 1776 was already 150 years after Plymouth Rock, and the initial ideologies were already set in stone. 

It obviously wasn't called Thanksgiving originally and the history is vague on that point, as is the slaughter and consumption of turkey. So a lot of it is a stitching together of mythologies into a tapestry that we behold today. It's a huge work of art in itself, which means it isn't history per se. 

What was particularly notable to me is the painting by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe (above), initially painted in 1914, then revised in 1925 to remove the headdresses of the Native Americans, apparently because it wasn't historically accurate, or the more cynical explanation that the person who commissioned it or asked to buy it, requested that it be "redacted". Only history knows but it makes the point that sometimes absent proof, people can make up all kinds of narratives. There is a similar expurgation in Henri Toulouse-Lautrec's painting At The Moulin Rouge which had the right side of the painting cut off because one of the owners thought the green face of the dancer was too strange. 

In terms of the music that might have been made there, I'm assuming it would have been percussion instruments and voices. If there were stringed instruments used it would have been a violin, wood flutes probably easily survived the sea journey, and perhaps a pump organ of some kind. It would have been devotional in nature, certainly not pagan, and a continuation of the music that would have been made on the ship.