Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving traditionally recalls a day of thankfulness observed by the Plymouth, MA colony in 1621. In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day should be observed each year in "humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience." In December 1941, as World War II had begun, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a joint resolution of Congress setting Thanksgiving Day as the fourth Thursday in November.