Giving Thanks Through the Centuries

摘要

ONE FOURTH OF JULY in the 1980s, when I was living in Hong Kong, 1 read a tidbit in a local newspaper about America's Independence Day. Across the U.S. today, the columnist declared, families are celebrating the birth of their nation by sitting down to turkey dinners with all the trimmings. The expatriate American community in what then was a British colony shared a chuckle over the columnist's confusion about the U.S.'s national holidays, but it also set me to thinking: in some sense, the error was a natural one. A non-American could be forgiven for conflating these two homegrown U.S. holidays. Both bind celebrants to the larger history of our nation.