There is something deeply unifying about knowing that every family in every cor…
Each year, Thanksgiving asks Americans to pause and recognize something shared — a table, a tradition, a belonging. Now, a law professor steps forward to argue that the holiday is worth defending not merely as nostalgia, but as a civic anchor, contending that the historical case against it rests on overstatements about conquest and land theft. In a season already shadowed by pandemic and division, the debate over Thanksgiving becomes a proxy for a deeper question: what stories a nation chooses to keep, and what it loses when it lets them go.
- Critics are intensifying pressure on Thanksgiving, framing it as a celebration of colonization and the suffering of Native peoples — a charge the author believes distorts the historical record.
- The author pushes back with legal and historical arguments, pointing to land purchase mechanisms like the Louisiana Purchase and indigenous property rights recognized in U.S. policy as evidence that 'theft' is too simple a verdict.
- The cultural battle over Columbus Day looms as a warning sign — Thanksgiving, the author fears, is next on the list of holidays targeted for cancellation.
- Beneath the legal argument runs an emotional one: the loss of Thanksgiving would fracture a rare moment of national unity, a shared meal that crosses every regional and social boundary.
- The story remains unresolved, arriving at a Thanksgiving already strained by COVID-19, where the holiday faces twin threats — one biological, one ideological — and its defenders are only beginning to organize their case.
A law professor has entered the ongoing cultural debate over Thanksgiving with a pointed defense of the holiday, arguing that critics who frame it as a celebration of genocide and land theft are working from an oversimplified — and in his view, historically inaccurate — foundation.
The author acknowledges the weight of indigenous history but challenges the legal and moral claim that European settlement amounted to straightforward conquest. He points to mechanisms like the Louisiana Purchase and to U.S. government policies that formally recognized indigenous land ownership rights as evidence that the story is more complicated than the harshest critics allow.
His deeper concern is cultural. Thanksgiving, he argues, is one of the few remaining rituals that genuinely unifies Americans across difference — the same meal, the same pause, observed in every corner of the country. To dismantle it, he warns, is to surrender something fragile and irreplaceable in the national fabric.
The piece arrives at an already fractured moment: a pandemic Thanksgiving, gatherings curtailed, and a holiday now caught between a virus and an ideological reckoning. The author frames both as threats to be resisted, and positions his defense of Thanksgiving as part of a broader argument about which stories America chooses to carry forward — and what it costs to let them go.
A story is developing around Thanksgiving is Worth Defending | Opinion. There is something deeply unifying about knowing that every family in every corner of the country is eating (more or less) the same meal and sharing in the same traditions.
This will be a Thanksgiving unlike any other, not just because of a resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also because of an upwelling of hostility toward the holiday itself. Both of these threats must be defeated—the virus because it t…
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