A very entertaining and interesting study about we how came to celebrate our Thanksgiving holiday as we do today. A key player is this is Sarah Josepha Hale who spent fifty years of her life campaigning for the holiday as a writer and editor of the very popular women's magazine Godey's Lady's Book in the eighteen hundreds. She sends letters to a series of presidents getting the most help from Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War. There all sorts of little nuggets of information here including who wrote the famous poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Easy to read and highly informative. ( )

Pretty much the history of the holiday of Thanksgiving in the United States and the campaign of Sarah Josepha Hale, widower and mother of 5 children to have a national holiday declared. Born in 1788 and dying in 1879, as a single young widower, Sarah got a job as the editor of Lady Book, so in some ways, she defined the modern woman. Campaigning each President for the creation of a national holiday on the 4th Thursday of November, a day George Washington originally set aside, it was President Lincoln who consistently during his administration declared a day of Thanksgiving. During FDR's tenure is when the Senate finally made Thanksgiving a national holiday. ( )