Search: “thanksgiving”
Part 1: “thanksgiving”
Beginning analysis, there is an important revelation when looking at the collocates: there are numerous issues with transcription when sorting by Stat. That is why I will complete the rest of the research with the default set to sort by frequency since these transcription errors will rank low among the number of times other terms appear in the corpus.
Note: With these apparent transcription errors, it is possible that there are more newspapers in the Chronicling America database that contain the search terms “thanksgiving” and “indian”. However, I am fairly certain that the majority of the newspapers are represented in this corpus due to the relatively limited amount of transcription errors.
*Since there are more instances of the word “thanksgiving” in the corpus, I have decided to include more collocates in the pie graph.
The words “indian” followed by “indians” have the highest frequency and relatively high Stat values indicating that they appear relatively often near the word “thanksgiving.” Additionally, it is interesting that recitation has such a high Stat value. The word “recitation” is found in the context of Thanksgiving services by children at school and this context sheds light on the other terms that also appear as collocates: Mr, Mrs, school, service, prayer, story, and song. These can all be connected to the celebration of Thanksgiving in the context of family and community.
Other findings:
- Notably, “dance” is most frequently used in connection with Native Americans (i.e. as in Native Americans performed a Thanksgiving dance).
- The word “pilgrims” has a fairly high Stat value.
- The word “first” is frequently used in reference to the first Thanksgiving.
- The word “spend” deals with both certain individuals spending time somewhere for Thanksgiving as well as Thanksgiving sales.
Looking at clusters:
- 1888 instances of Thanksgiving day
- 453 instances of Thanksgiving dinner
- 80 instances of Thanksgiving services
- 37 instances of Thanksgiving story
I was particularly interested in the latter cluster since Thanksgiving stories may feature explicit references to Native Americans in perhaps a nuanced way. Looking at the contexts, I found a similar paragraph repeated in four different text files:
“Those were troubled times with Western folks. The Indians were not very near us; indeed, father never had a fear in regard to the Indians attacking us. No one whom we knew of, living within twenty miles of us, had been troubled by the Indians.”
This clearly plays into the “Vanishing Indian” myth that Native Americans were nearly non-existent and had left nothing behind.
A few paragraphs down, two boys are lost in the woods and a Native American finds them:
“His big, feathered head loomed up out of a clump of young trees, and I’m sure his big mouth was grinning in delight over us—two children alone in the woods.”
This is an extremely racist caricature of indigenous people. Looking at the details of individual newspapers, file 1021.txt is from New Jersey and file 1277.txt is from Omaha, but both are from 1882. Looking back at the timeline, this was in the years before the Dawes Act, when even more land was taken away from Native Americans. This story could have served as propaganda, illustrating why it was necessary to “civilize” Native Americans because children were supposedly not safe when they were around.