Every year families across America come together on the fourth Thursday of November to celebrate Thanksgiving Day. However, many don’t realize what lies behind the holiday.

“On Thanksgiving day we always have the same food like turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce and stuff,” Jacob De Oliveira, a freshman engineering student at Fresno State said.

The history of this American and Canadian holiday originates back to the first Pilgrims who came from England and settled at Plymouth Rock. However, the story of how the Pilgrims and Indians came together has been debated.

“The one that historians refer back to is the original Thanksgiving that happens in 1621, but this story has been mainly mythologized,” Fresno State history professor Brad Jones said.

The well-known story usually consists of pilgrims peacefully dinning with Native Americans to celebrate unity and the survival of the New England colony against the harsh wilderness of the American continent.

Like many other historians Jones said the celebration was for political purposes.

“We tend to think of Thanksgiving as a time when the pilgrims and Indians came together to break bread, but in actuality it was for a diplomatic purpose,” Jones said. “It was a period of incredible turmoil and strife.”

By 1631, the Pilgrims and Native Americans were fighting heavily and the colonials were destroying Indian tribes while invading the continent.

The first meal between the Pilgrims and Indians was a diplomatic peace agreement to help preserve the colonies but in the process became a detriment to the Native Americans.

“By about 1630, the New England colonies had exterminated an entire Indian tribe,” Jones added.

However, the actual Thanksgiving holiday didn’t come around until two centuries later.

“During the Civil War, President Lincoln introduces a day of observance or of mourning for the people who had died in the awful war. And that day was adopted as the official day for Thanksgiving,” Jones explained. “Lincoln did not mean to make a day for Thanksgiving but it evolved into the official observance day 20 to 30 years later.”

Many people feel that Thanksgiving Day has become associated with the American cultural phenomenon of holiday shopping. Some believe that our society has fallen away from the traditional ideas of being thankful for what we have, which was what President Lincoln had originally intended when he first introduced the day of observance.

“I hate it when people miss the point of what Thanksgiving is really about,” De Oliveira said. “Holidays are great and I’m happy that I get to see my family and that’s what it should be about.”