If you're stuffed with Thanksgiving stuffing, pick up a Puritan sermon. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. As columnists remind us every year, there are a lot of problems with Thanksgiving â the glorification of settler-colonialism; the tense dinners with relatives; turkey. But long before the current crop of debunkers and kvetchers, the dean of American studies, Perry Miller, who died in 1963, identified what he saw as the holidayâs original sin: its abandonment of the logic of Puritan days of thanksgiving, which were held in gratitude for good harvests, good weather, the cessation of disease, the avoidance of shipwreck â and which had their opposite in days of humiliation, desperate fasts imposed whenever things went wrong. Things were going wrong most of the time. Early on, as Miller explains in The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), the settlers âobserved mostly days of humiliation.â The disappearance of Thanksgivingâs opposite number, the fast day, might bear some responsibility for the self-satisfied chauvinism that is such a tempting target for todayâs Thanksgiving naysayers. Miller got there first: âBy the time ceremonial gratitude can be channelized into an annual festival, calculated in advance, society is rewarding its own well-doing, not acknowledging divine favor.â The really characteristic 17th-century ritual was not the day of thanks but the fast day. (Something like Thanksgiving as we now know it would have to wait until 1863.) By the 1660s, a special variant of fast-day sermon had emerged: the jeremiad, usually based on a text from Jeremiah or Isaiah. Miller calls it âthe one literary typeâ into which the colonists âpoured their energy and their passion.â The jeremiad enumerated faults â âsinful Heats and Hatreds,â as Increase Mather and his co-authors put it in a 1679 document, âevil Surmisings, uncharitable and unrighteous Censures, back-Bitings, hearing and telling Tales,â not to mention a tendency to get âDrunk, or well Tipledâ â and urged repentance, So if youâve overindulged on Thanksgiving food and are asking, with The New York Times, â[How Can I Soothe My Stomach After Thanksgiving Dinner?]( you might want to supplement their advice (spoiler alert: peppermint oil) with Thomas Shepard Jr.'s 1672 fast-day sermon âEye-Salve, or a Watch-Word from Our Lord Jesus Christ Unto His Churches in New England.â Shepard saw his people in a sorry state â âHypocrisy, divisors, carnal mixtures, despising Godâs Sabbaths, loosewalking, temporizing, sensuality, pride and idleness, fullness of breadâ â and counseled âModeration! Moderation! Moderation!â That, peppermint oil, and repentance should go a long way. For more on Perry Miller, check out Rivka Maizlishâs tribute in the blog of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, [here](. ADVERTISEMENT REGISTER NOW [Join us January 9-27]( for a virtual professional development program on overcoming the challenges of the department chair role and creating a strategic vision for individual and departmental growth. [Reserve your spot today!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Rise of Chinaâs Universities]( By William C. Kirby [STORY IMAGE]( No nation has a more successful record of promoting talent to serve state and society. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | OPINION [Higher Edâs Prestige Paralysis]( By Brian Rosenberg [STORY IMAGE]( College reputations are fixed, valuable, and based on almost no hard evidence. Recommended - âHe wanted to be a âliberal of a new kind,â aligned neither with âthe friends of orderâ nor with the âdirty democrats of our age.ââ In The New York Review of Books, Lynn Hunt [on Tocqueville]( by way of Olivier Zunzâs new biography.
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