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Partakers of plenty

Chapter 1: PARTAKERS OF PLENTY A Study of the First Thanksgiving
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About This Book

The essay reconstructs an early New England harvest celebration recorded by an eyewitness, arguing it functioned as a communal harvest festival and feast rather than a solemn religious rite. It outlines the settlers' mixed social origins and medieval English cultural continuities, the hazardous transatlantic crossing and devastating first winter, and the political response that produced a participatory compact. It examines encounters with indigenous people, whose numbers had been reduced by epidemic, and the food exchanges, hunting, and gifts that formed the feast. Combining historical narrative with ethnogastronomic analysis, the study situates the event in English harvest customs and explores what the meal reveals about survival, community, and cultural memory.

PARTAKERS OF PLENTY
A Study of the First Thanksgiving

James Deetz and Jay Anderson



This article is printed with the permission of the
Saturday Review of Science and was previously published
under the title of “The Ethnogastronomy of Thanksgiving”
in the November 25, 1972 issue of the
Saturday Review of Science