Thanksgiving/Talk

Uhhh - the first official thanksgiving in English-speaking colonies - Virginia. Sorry, Pilgirms. Oh, and - if you just want to count European colonists, Spanish-speaking thanksgiving services date back a good bit further. --MichaelTinkler

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"In the Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia is a document of 1619 which tells of the first twelve years of the Jamestown colony. The first settlement had a hundred persons, who had one small ladle of barley per meal. When more people arrived, there was even less food. Many of the people lived in cavelike holes dug into the ground, and in the winter of 1609-1610, they were:"

"" . . . driven through insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most abhorred, the flesh and excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an Indian, digged by some out of his grave after he had laid buried there days and wholly devoured him; others, envying the better state of body of any whom hunger has not yet so much wasted as their own, lay wait and threatened to kill and eat them; one among them slew his wife as she slept in his bosom, cut her in pieces, salted her and fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts saving her head . . .""

What the colonists in Virginia were doing with the Indians one year when they didn't give thanks.

(Source: Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. Harper Collins: New York. 1995)

-trimalchio