-On December 4, 1619, 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred. The group's charter required their day of arrival be observed yearly as a "day of thanksgiving" to God. On that first day, Captain John Woodleaf held the service of thanksgiving. This site became Berkeley Plantation and is still host to an annual Thanksgiving event. President George W. Bush gave his official Thanksgiving address in 2007 at Berkeley.
-Squanto, a Patuxet Native American who resided with the Wampanoag tribe, taught the Pilgrims how to catch eel and grow corn and served as an interpreter for them. The Pilgrims set apart a day to celebrate at Plymouth immediately after their first harvest, in 1621. At the time, this was not regarded as a Thanksgiving observance but a harvest festival.
-The Pilgrims did not hold a true Thanksgiving until 1623, following a drought, prayers for rain, and a subsequent rain shower. Irregular Thanksgivings continued after favorable events and days of fasting after unfavorable ones. In the Plymouth tradition, a thanksgiving day was a church observance, rather than a feast day.-The Massachusetts Bay Colony which consisted mainly of Puritan Christians celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time in 1630, and frequently thereafter until about 1680, when it became an annual festival in that colony.
-During the American Revolutionary War the Continental Congress appointed one or more thanksgiving days each year. The First National Proclamation of Thanksgiving was given by the Continental Congress in 1777. George Washington proclaimed a Thanksgiving in December 1777 as a victory celebration honoring the defeat of the British at Saratoga.
-A Thanksgiving Day was annually appointed by the governor of New York from 1817. In some of the Southern states there was opposition to the observance on the grounds that it was a relic of Puritanic bigotry. Still, by 1858 governors of 25 states and two territories had appointed a day of thanksgiving.
-In the middle of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln, prompted by a series of editorials written by Sarah Josepha Hale, proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day, to be celebrated on the final Thursday in November 1863. Ever since, Thanksgiving has been observed annually in the United States and Lincoln's successors followed his example of annually declaring the final Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving.
-1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt broke with this tradition. November had five Thursdays that year, and Roosevelt declared the fourth Thursday as Thanksgiving rather than the fifth one. In 1940, in which November had four Thursdays, he declared the third one as Thanksgiving, suggesting his plan was to establish the holiday on the next-to-last Thursday in the month instead of the last one. With the country still in the midst of The Great Depression, Roosevelt thought an earlier Thanksgiving would give merchants a longer period to sell goods before Christmas. At the time, advertising goods for Christmas before Thanksgiving was considered inappropriate.
-The U.S. Congress in 1941 split the difference and passed a bill requiring that Thanksgiving be observed annually on the fourth Thursday of November, which was sometimes the last Thursday and sometimes (less frequently) the next to last.
-Since at least 1947 the National Turkey Federation has presented the President of the United States with one live turkey and two dressed turkeys, in a ceremony known as the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation. The live turkey is pardoned and lives out the rest of its days on a peaceful farm. While it is commonly held that this pardoning tradition began with Harry Truman in 1947, the Truman Library has been unable to find any evidence for this. The earliest on record is with George H. W. Bush in 1989.
To read Thanksgiving Proclamations in full, please see Wikipedia
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