Although the Thanksgiving story is typically associated with the harvest feast of Pilgrims and Wampanoags in Plymouth, Massachusetts, 404 years ago this fall, the national holiday Americans celebrate every fourth Thursday of November only began thanks to a presidential proclamation from Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the same year he delivered the Gettysburg Address.

That’s not just historical trivia. What we are meant to commemorate on Thanksgiving isn’t merely a mythologized version of our origins. It’s a celebration of American rebirth — and of the possibilities, personal and political, that go with it.

The idea for a national Thanksgiving holiday was not Lincoln’s own. It came from Sarah Josepha Hale, among the most influential Americans you’ve probably never heard of. “A partial list of H

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