Holidays
The First Thanksgiving Was for the Constitution
What defined the first national Thanksgiving? Gratitude to God, the Constitution, and a forgotten founder.
Annalee Blonquist
November 25, 2025
What defined the first national Thanksgiving? Gratitude to God, the Constitution, and a forgotten founder.
Constitutional conflicts can arise when religious language and behavior take an aggressive and domineering posture toward government and society as a whole.
What sustains the Constitution? Founders distrusted power, built checks on ambition, and trusted agency as divine.
Can Netflix’s ‘American Primeval’ justify its fictional Brigham Young? No, it fosters cultural bias under artistic license.
How do Latter-day Saints navigate the US Constitution and their faith’s history? It’s a complex picture with both gratitude and warnings.
Exploring the ‘sin’ of our time, this piece unveils the arrogance in assuming history is deterministically linear.
Early Americans saw intelligence and love in tension. But Latter-day Saint doctrine understood God’s nature differently.
Journey through the labyrinth of history viewed through the prism of presentism. Reappraise the honesty of past historians and redefine your understanding of history.
As we celebrate President’s Day today, let us be reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s inaguaral address he gave on March 4, 1865. Those words spoken then are just as relevant toay as they were in 1865. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
A group of disagreeing folks that self-governs together? Do be serious. Retelling the glorious founding tale and what makes the United States unique as we anticipate the anniversary of its birth.
I discuss the politicization of history and how it applies in education with a couple of history educators. We also consider Christopher Columbus with historical empathy.
Those who indict prior generations for “lying” because their histories differ from modern-day telling’s in scope or emphasis, plainly demonstrate what anthropologists call “ethnocentrism.” That’s a problem. And it’s time to hold these accusers more accountable for the real-life, human impact of their allegations.