Happy Thanksgiving! In honor of this delicious holiday, we start off this week’s What We’re Reading with Thanksgiving and food related posts.  Then, check out images from the Library of Congress’s Flickr page, Yuri Dojc’s “Last Folio” exhibit, and a forgotten file at the Denver Post.  Finally listen to an NPR story on “An Unlikely African-American Music Historian,” take a look at “Mr. Wilson’s University,” and check out Jeffrey Herf’s “Hate Radio” along with Richard Wolin’s response, ”Herf’s Misuses of History.”

Thanksgiving and Food Related Posts

• The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings
  This page from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum’s web site explains that in 1939 there were actually two Thanksgivings. Besides recounting an interesting moment in history, this site also includes some primary documents, from a Letter from Downtown Association of Los Angeles to FDR encouraging the President to move Thanksgiving one week earlier to a Satirical letter from Shelby Bennett to FDR asking President Roosevelt to change other days of the week.
• Thanksgiving blogging, redux: How Not to Cook a Wolf
  Historiann rounds up some of her past Thanksgiving posts and then takes a look at How to Cook a Wolf  from 1942, “a guide to surviving rationing and fuel shortages in the U.S. during World War II.”
• A Thanksgiving Feast (of Archives!)
  Stephen Vider at the Lazy Scholar blog rounds up some Thanksgiving selections from online archives.
• Rebunking the Pilgrims
  Randall Stephens at The Historical Society blog asks, “How do Pilgrims fit into American history and religious history in general?”
• Liberty, Equality, Gastronomy: Paris via a 19th-Century Guide
  Tony Perrottet is a “a food-obsessed traveler,” who “uses the Zagat guide of the Napoleonic era to explore the culinary wonders of [Paris] in the 21st century.”
• The Evolution of the Coca-Cola Contour Bottle
  The Dieline package design blog takes a look at the Coke bottle since 1899.

Images

• Photochroms Give Us Holland’s Nice, Bright Colors
  The Library of Congress announces it has posted new photocroms from the Netherlands in the 1890s to 1910s to their Flickr page.
• Yuri Dojc’s Last Folio: An Exhibition
  Rachel Leow at the Cliopatria blog examines the haunting images in Yuri Dojc’s “Last Folio” exhibit, which documents artifacts in “an old Jewish school in eastern Slovakia, a building frozen in time since one fateful day in 1943 in which every teacher and child in the school was spirited away to the concentration camps.”
• Native American Prints from the Pennington Photo Studio
  Denver Post librarians recently uncovered images of Native Americans taken by William Pennington and Lisle Updike in the early 1900s.

What Else We’re Reading

• An Unlikely African American Music Historian
  NPR tells the story of Polk Miller, a former Confederate soldier, who grew up listening to African American music on his family’s Virginia plantation and learned how to play banjo from his father’s slaves. He and his quartet recorded some of the first interracial music; however, "He glorified black music, while at the same wearing the stars and bars, standing up for the legacy of the Confederacy."
• Woodrow Wilson and Princeton, Then and Now
  Last month scholars James Axtell, John Milton Cooper, Stan Katz and others met at a Princeton conference to consider "The Educational Legacy of Woodrow Wilson." His legacy, it turns out, is pretty much in decline.
• Hate Radio
  Jeffrey Herf, professor of modern European and German history at the University of Maryland at College Park, explores “Nazi propaganda in the Arab world.” And Richard Wolin, teacher of history and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, responds with “Herf’s Misuses of History.”

Contributors: David Darlington, Elisabeth Grant, Vernon Horn, and Jessica Pritchard

This post first appeared on AHA Today.