November 27, 2015 ▸ History

Episode 46: Thanksgiving

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For this week’s episode of The Sofa King Podcast, we focus on everyone’s most gluttonous holiday—Thanksgiving. We try to get an accurate account of history for Thanksgiving and note the fact that most historical sources don’t line up on this one. Obviously, Americans celebrate the landing of the pilgrims on the Mayflower at Plymouth, but a lot of historical facts may be surprising about the American continent: for example, it was already populated by an intelligent, wide-spread culture of Native Americans and had been colonized by Europeans for a hundred years before the Mayflower ever blew off course.

We look back through the 1600s, 1700s and up to the present and explore what Thanksgiving originally was and what has become. No conversation about the history of Thanksgiving would be accurate without a look at the native population of America (though with us at the helm, it probably isn’t accurate anyway!). We end with a look at the life of turkeys in modern factory farms and uncover some fairly cruel facts about the birds and how they are inseminated, raised, genetically modified, and slaughtered.