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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and happy Thanksgiving. Our team is off today cooking, going to grandma's house. The things people do like everyone else, so we've got some recent favorites today, lightly edited for your holiday listening pleasure. You will learn more about the history of Thanksgiving. It's not all about the turkey after all. Plus, some history of American clothing.

Also, Julian Brave NoiseCat on some indigenous peoples history appropriately, and we'll have some fun with words that are specific to your family. Maybe you'll have some of those around the Thanksgiving table today, or learn a few from us on your way. We start here with the new Ken Burns docu series, taking a clear eyed look at this country's founding. Of course, we can't take but we wish you a happy Thanksgiving and enjoy.

Well, the legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has rolled out another ambitious project. It's called The American Revolution, and it's pegged to the fact that we are now in the 250th anniversary year of the founding of the United States. Think about it, July 4th, 1776 to July 4th, 2026 is 250 years, a quarter of a millennium. We've already passed the 200th anniversary of the start of the war, which was April 1775, and just in time for Thanksgiving when people think more than usual about the colonial era.

The six episodes premiered on November 16th, and are still airing on some local PBS stations. Ken Burns joins us now along with co-director and longtime collaborator Sarah Botstein, so we will talk, and we will listen to a few audio clips from Episode 1. Ken and Sarah also have an Atlantic magazine story in the November issue called What We Learned from Filming the American Revolution. Sarah, welcome, and Ken, welcome back to WNYC.

Ken Burns: Thank you, Brian.

Sarah Botstein: Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: You didn't try to tell the story of the last 250 years, Ken, just of the period of the American Revolution. Why did you choose that as your frame for six episodes of two hours each?

Ken Burns: Well, first of all, I take issue with your word "peg" in the introduction, because we began this in December of 2015. Barack Obama still had 13 months to go in his presidency. Nobody was talking 250. We weren't thinking 250. We just realized after the Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam, we had this big glaring hole in our resume which had to do-[crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Those films that you had done.

Ken Burns: -with our founding story.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Yes. Go ahead. Just so people know you're referencing films.

Ken Burns: Yes. Films that we had done. It was daunting, of course, because there are no photographs or newsreels from this period, but we really felt strongly to dive in, and know about it. It was only halfway through that we began to realize, "We might be done in '25," which means it's the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord. Then, all of a sudden, people said, "Oh, you've planned it this way."

Suffice to say, I think the American Revolution, I believe Sarah agrees with me, is one of the most consequential events in all of world history, and that we know very little of it. It suffers from a glossed over, sentimental view of both bloodless and gallant, but short on the facts that this was a bloody revolution superimposed over a bloody Civil War, and a big global war, the fourth war for the global war for the prize of North America.

Just that alone, and the sense that we normally think of it as just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts. It needed to have, I thought, a deep dive into it, and that's what we've spent the last nearly 10 years doing.

Brian Lehrer: Let me play for our listeners the very first words of the film, and listeners, see if you can guess whose words are being read here before they identify them at the end.

[audio clip playing]

Matthew Rhys: From a small spark kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished. Without consuming, it winds its progress from nation-to-nation, and conquers by a silent operation. Man finds himself changed and discovers that the strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it, and that in order to be free, it is sufficient that he wills it. Thomas Paine.

Brian Lehrer: Sarah, why'd you open the docu series with that?

Sarah Botstein: Well, what a wonderful question. I think we wrestled, as we often do, with how to start the film and, of course, how to end the film. Who should have the first word, and who should have the last. It took us a while to figure out exactly what to put in that important position. I think over the course of making the series, Thomas Paine's influence, his words, his writings, became essential.

We know that it's essential to the history, but we hadn't quite understood how essential, and Ken had the idea about halfway through editing that each episode would be named for, or taken from a Thomas Paine piece of writing. I think we wanted everyone to sit down on November 16th, and get a sense that we were going to take a big bite out of this apple, and for me, it's a beautiful quote that casts forward how important the American Revolution is, as Ken was just saying, in terms of world history, but that something very new was going to happen here, and that quote does that for me.

It took a while for us to order the first few elements of the show, and it was really one of the more fun things to figure out. We love that quote, and it's so beautifully read by Matthew Rhys, the wonderful actor.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know if you want this question, but I couldn't help but be struck by that opening clip, that there is so much talk these days about the will to resist tyranny, and not giving into it voluntarily. You don't make that explicit connection to the politics of today, but maybe you don't have to. Did you drop that in there as you lead, because you thought people would relate?

Sarah Botstein: I think I will say very--

Brian Lehrer: Not at all.

Sarah Botstein: Unequivocally, no. I think actually to-- Ken and I will both talk about this a lot is my guest in the next few minutes, but I think the echoes and resonances that people will find, seem so relevant to today, but as Ken was just saying, we've been working on this project for 10 years, and some of these things are just themes of human history, of the history of the American experience, the history of the American Revolution, so, in fact, that's a really interesting point you just made, but that really had nothing to do with why it got that position.

Brian Lehrer: All right, so let's go right on.

Ken Burns: Yes, I think, Sarah--[crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. You want to add something, Ken, go ahead.

Ken Burns: No, I think Sarah's hiding her light under the bushel. It's her genius to move that quote from the middle of the introduction just a few minutes later to the opening as a way to set it up, but one of the disciplines we've had, not just for this film, but for every film we've worked on for me, for the past 50 years, has been that discipline of not erecting these neon signs, pointing and saying, "Isn't this so like today?"

I mean, there's a moment later on in our fourth episode when a wife of a German general is coming to join the Battle of Saratoga, and she's worried that Americans eat cats. Now, if our film had come out last fall, everyone would be saying, "Oh, my goodness, you must have put that," and I think it will just pass over, and will just be a funny anxiety on the part of Baroness Ruysdael.

We consciously make sure, we know that every film will always rhyme as Mark Twain suggested in the present because, as Sarah said, "Human nature doesn't change." The American experience is, we're fraught right now almost in a Chicken Little moment about how the sky is falling, and how divided we are. Well, we're way more divided during the American Revolution, where loyalists are killing patriots, and patriots are killing loyalists, and British soldiers and their hired guns, the Germans are killing us, and Native Americans are trying to figure out which side to ally with.

Enslaved and Black, and free Black Americans are trying to do the same thing. Women are involved. Spain and the Netherlands joined France in the effort against Britain, and their effort is half-hearted when it comes to trying to establish a Republican government, but very committed to the defeat of the other monarchy in Britain, so it is got so many moving parts that if you spend any time focusing on these temporal things, you've done your audience, and yourself as filmmakers a disservice.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go right on to another clip. This is just two minutes into Episode 1, as in a way, the timeline of the story begins

[audio clip playing]

[music]

Speaker: in the spring of 1754. The celebrated scientist and writer Benjamin Franklin proposed that the British colonies form a similar union. He printed a cartoon of a snake cut into pieces above the dire warning "Join or die." A few weeks later at Albany, New York, Franklin and other delegates from seven colonies agreed to his plan of union, and then went home to try and sell it, but when the plan was presented at the colonial capitals, each of the individual legislatures rejected it, because they did not want to give up their autonomy. The plan died, but the idea would survive. 20 years later, Join or die would be a rallying cry in the most consequential revolution in history.

Brian Lehrer: Sarah, you want to talk a little bit more about what that sets up? What put the colonies so resistant to a union in 1754 on the path to join or die, as they called it by 1776. Because I think when the American Revolution is taught, at least, basically to school kids these days, it's as if there was always a glide path to that inevitability.

Sarah Botstein: Right. Well, I think one of the things that you learn in studying the American Revolution, and certainly the lead up to the shots being fired at Lexington and Concord, is that like any big important war, that becomes a world war, that changes the course, as we say in the introduction of human events. There's a big runway. It doesn't just happen overnight, and so I think there are a few things in that beautiful scene, which again is just an essential element to setting the stage for the whole war, which is that, a few things, one, to your point, the states are not a monolith, never have been, I don't think ever will be.

We have constantly, through our whole history wrestled with states versus a federal government. That's at the heart of the American experience. I think after, it's also important to remember the Native American experience, and the Native American history is so intertwined with what we think of as the American Revolution, so you have the French and Indian War, the Seven Years War, you have the founders thinking about what we need to do, how the 13 colonies might unite? What's happening with the mother country?

There are seeds of revolution that happen for 20 years before those shots are fired at Lexington and Concord. One of the most important is actually when Britain unleashes a standing army in Boston in 1768, and the colonists-- When you have a standing army, things change. I think Benjamin Franklin, looking to the Haudenosaunee, to the Native Americans as a form of democracy, and then understanding the seeds of war, and how much the American Revolution was at its heart, a civil war, are all in that.

Brian Lehrer: Ken, I do want to note that you wrote in your-- You both wrote the article, but in the Atlantic magazine that the true protagonists of your series are, of course, the people who experience the war. Would you like to give everybody a preview of the breadth of experiences you document?

Ken Burns: Yes. That, Brian, is a really good thing, and it speaks to the clip that you just played, because the key word in the first sentence in 1754, Benjamin Franklin wanted to adopt a similar union. The similar union is to the Iroquois Confederacy, as Sarah referenced the Haudenosaunee, so the whole model, the idea of a democracy, one that had been functioning for centuries, or a version of it, of individual states, individual nations, figuring that they had both individual interests and identities, and also common ones that didn't fly right away, but gradually Americans from Georgia to New Hampshire got themselves acquainted with the idea, and saw the strength in that union. It's entirely inspired by Native Americans.

Instead of just having the familiar cast of characters, the founding fathers, the bold faced names, they're there, but we've tried to remove the stigma of their opacity, or their one dimensionality by giving them full lives, and complications and undertows. At the same time, we want to introduce you to literally scores of other people. A 14-year-old kid, John Greenwood from Boston, who enlists at age 14, and down in Connecticut, Joseph Plumbarton, the ripe old age of 15, joins the Patriot cause.

We follow the exploits of Loyalists, one of whom, John Peters ends up killing his best friend in the Battle of Bennington, who's on the other side, a best friend who has run him almost through with a bayonet, and he is, as Peters says, "Chillingly obliged to destroy him." We have a little girl, Betsy Ambler, who's 10 years old when the war begins. A refugee for most of the war. She lives in Yorktown, and you can understand why she can never go back to her hometown, but it's unusual to think of Americans as refugees within, in this case, the colony, and then the state of Virginia.

We also have many Black characters, both free and enslaved. We have many Native Americans. It's not of them. These are distinct nations that have as much separate identity as France might have from Prussia, and we want to honor the singularity of each of those nations, and the complicated choices they have to make, not just in a local scene. Then, we have French soldiers and generals, and statesmen and kings, and an English king, and his ministers, and his generals, and soldiers from Ireland and Scotland and Wales and England trying to do his bidding, and German troops that I mentioned before at both the grunt level, and others.

Then, you have myriad citizens who are disaffected, and want to stay out of it, and that chorus of voices. We have more than 400 first person voices. Of course, George Washington is there, but we also have Betsy Ambler and they're read. We're fortunate, in addition to Matthew Rhys, by probably the greatest off camera cast that's ever been assembled for any movie, or television series because of the quality of the acting to help make a period that seems so distant to us come alive, and they do so, I think, magnificently.

Tom Hanks, and Meryl Streep, and Liev Schreiber, and Jeff Daniels, and Paul Giamatti and Morgan Freeman, and Samuel L. Jackson, and Laura Linney, and Claire Danes, and Sir Kenneth Branagh, and Damian Lewis. I've maybe gone through a fifth of the folks who have read over the last decade for us.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I guess this is something in a number of your historical documentaries that you've had to figure out how to do. How do you approach a documentary about a time before there was film, right?

Ken Burns: Well, in the beginning, Brian is the word, and that's what we get back to. Not only does it begin with the extraordinary script that our longtime collaborator, Jeffrey C. Ward has written, but it's all those first person voices in many cases assembled by us, and by Jeff, or by our third co-director, David Schmidt, that we find in the course. We follow footnotes, and we discover Betsy Ambler by following a trail of footnotes and discover John Greenwood.

Some people have been familiar, or generally known at least to the scholarly community, and then again, we have two dozen scholars that advised us, and nearly 20 are in the film, all of whom represented different expertise. Native Americans and Kathleen DuVal, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for extraordinary book Native Nations, or it might be their teacher, Alan Taylor, or the great Gordon Wood, now retired from Brown, and his teacher, the late Bernard Bailyn, who, because we've been working on this for so long, we had the chance to interview.

Then, filming all across this beautiful territory. The biggest star, as Sarah likes to say, is the landscape itself beset by weather no one knew was coming, by the distance the British could never appreciate, by the sheer beauty and variety of it that permits people to disappear and reappear. If you're a patriot, guerrilla waging war in New Jersey, or in South Carolina, the real guerrilla actions of the war.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you read their Atlantic piece about the making of this documentary series, The American Revolution, you'll see that it begins with a meditation on the weather of that time in the Revolutionary War years, and the weather while they were making the film, so it's a good read, which I recommend. Monk in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein. Hi, Monk.

Monk: Hi. Thank you for having me. I was just-- I've been watching your documentaries since I was a child, and it's always struck me how amazing it is that you can compile so much information to get the whole picture. I was just curious as to what that process is like. Where do you have a team? What's the extent of the process of gathering all this information and then organizing it, and applying it to the documentary?

Ken Burns: The first thing I'd say is that you would presume, Monk, that this is an additive process. It's subtractive. We have 40 times the material we collect is what's used, so Sarah can describe what's a fairly handmade film, and the team that puts together and why it takes a decade.

Sarah Botstein: Yes, I mean, I love a few things about your question. One is that central to the work we do is collaboration. We are a team in the truest sense of the word. At our smallest, we're really a group of about four. It's Ken and Jeff Ward and David Schmidt and me, and then we blossom out to 25 or 30, and then at the end, about 40 amazing people over the course of that decade.

One of the things that people, I think, like to hear about is that part of our process is very fluid. We're always researching, we're always writing, we're editing until the very last second, and we're always, always researching. Part of our production team, and part of our production office is actually an old fashioned library archive. There are those producers and researchers that are, for this film, totally immersed in the paintings.

How has the American Revolution been represented in art for the last 250 years? Some of our researchers do only maps. They study the maps of the time, and then we spent about two or three years really fastidiously making new maps for the series. Two dimensional and in CGI form to recreate a true landscape and topography of 18th century America. Rivers were different. There were not dams the way we know today. There weren't the roads that we have today.

We wanted to really give viewers a sense of what the country was like, because the land is so essential both to the story of the American Revolution, and to the war, which are the same thing, actually, but we often forget that. Then, there are documents and music, so all of the elements that go into our films, if you're making a film about the Vietnam War, that would be photographs and newsreels.

If you're making a film about the American Revolution, that's paintings and documents and maps, we bring material in, as Ken was just saying, usually, about 40 to 1, but then we have to know everything about those images, those documents, that archival material. We are fastidious fact checkers, but also fastidious archivists. We handle material really carefully. We log it really carefully.

We're responsible for understanding where it came from, and then in the last year of production, we do a lot of technical work on the film. Whether that's sound design and sound effects, and making the film look and sound beautiful, but we have to clear and get rights for everything, so we become a-- It's a copyright puzzle. You think making a film about the 18th century is simple when it comes to copyright, it's unbelievably complicated.

We're also dealing with archival material from literally around the world, so it's-- Yes, we have a great office in New York City that does a huge amount of that, and then enormous, beautiful editing house in Walpole, New Hampshire where Ken is, and it's an incredible team, and we're lucky to get up and go to work with them every day.

Brian Lehrer: Now, you can't make an honest film about the nation's origin story without dealing with slavery, so here's about a one-minute excerpt in which, listeners, you will hear the reading of two quotes. They are the bookends in this clip with a short narration in between them.

[audio clip playing]

Speaker: I need not point out the absurdity of your exertions for liberty, while you have slaves in your houses. If you are sensible that slavery is in itself, and in its consequences a great evil, why will you not pity and relieve the poor, distressed, enslaved Africans? Caesar Sarter.

[music]

Speaker: Slavery as a metaphor is in the conversation from the beginning. Everywhere there's slavery, there are people thinking about freedom. Nothing shows the desire for freedom like the struggles of subject peoples.

Amanda Gorman: I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:

What pangs excruciating must molest,

What sorrows labor in my parent's breast?

Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd

That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:

Such, such my case. And can I then but pray

Others may never feel tyrannic sway? Phillis Wheatley.

Brian Lehrer: Ken, would you talk about that stretch that's from about one hour into Episode 1. Those quotes or anything you learned that maybe was new to even you about slavery and its place during the revolution?

Ken Burns: It's all new to us, Brian. We have our own cursory sense of the revolution, and then it's exploded by the deep dive that the decade at PBS, and that's the key player here, permits us to have at the end. You heard Amanda Gorman, who delivered the inauguration poem at the inauguration of Joseph Biden as president. She is reading Phillis Wheatley, who is the first published African American and enslaved girl that is named Phyllis after the ship that brought her, and Wheatley after the family that bought her.

We are in the midst of a revolution moment. As Jane Kaminsky, the scholar you hear in the middle, who is formerly of Harvard University, and now the head of Monticello, where she has to wrestle with the essential tensions and questions of slavery. You have people talking and using, as she referred to the metaphor of slavery to describe what the British are doing.

The hypocrisy is not lost on Caesar Sarter, and many, many others who comment, in this case read by Samuel L. Jackson, expertly on that irony and that hypocrisy, and so what you have is between 2.5 and 3 million people living in what we call the 13 original colonies. 500,000 of them are enslaved, or free Africans, who have an immense stake, as do women, and many others, as Jane says, subject people to the ideas that are floating around.

We can, in our unforgiving revisionism, throw out or cancel those who participate in it, but they open the door with the language of their understanding. What begins as a quarrel over British rights, becomes transcendent rights. As the scholar Christopher Brown in our film says, and those transcendent rights are best embodied by the phrase "All men are created equal." Of course, the man who wrote that, Thomas Jefferson, meant all white men of property, but the word "all", as the scholar Yuval Levin reminds us, is the thing that breaks down the door.

Slavery's dead. The second those words are written, it's going to take four score and nine years. Women are going to have the vote. It's going to take, I'm sorry to say, 144 years, but this is the great story of the Revolution, and you cannot tell it, unless you have the ballast and counterweight of all of those, and I haven't even mentioned the Native Americans, some of whom are assimilated, some of whom are coexisting within the footprint of the 13 colonies, once their land.

Then, there are these Nations, as I said to the west, who are trying to figure out, "Do we go with the British? Do we go with these new people?" It divides them in very important ways, but none of them are free of the hunger for the ideas. We could say the enlightenment ideas. They may just be in the human breast from the very beginning. Ideas of freedom and liberty. Another African American says in the film, "Nowhere does God say that, that somebody that has a different skin color is less free than another," and that is true. God does not say that.

Brian Lehrer: One more call, Lorinda in Park Slope. You're on WNYC with Sarah Botstein and Ken Burns on their new PBS docuseries, The American Revolution. Hi, Lorinda.

Lorinda: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I am an LTL, FTC as well, and I just had a question as to whether the filmmakers are concerned that, given the times we're in right now, when people are in fact calling for a revolution, are committing violent acts, did stage an insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, that the film might in some ways give people permission, or encouragement, or feel it gives them a justification for taking these kinds of actions in the current time?

Brian Lehrer: What a question, Ken.

Ken Burns: It's a wonderful question. Maybe Sarah, too, would respond. I think when someone is in crisis, you reach out to a pastor, or a professional who wants to know who are your parents, what was the circumstances of your childhood? You begin to go and reassemble a productive narrative by going into the past. There is nothing scary. There's nothing-- No permission given in the film, but there's nothing scary about investigating where you began in order to know where you are, and potentially where you're going.

I mean, your question could have easily gone in another direction. This is the original No Kings Movement, right? We have at the end of our Battle of Yorktown, a German soldier we've been following throughout the series, who is openly contemptuous of these rebels. That's all the Brits and the Hessians call the Americans, and he said, "Who would have thought 100 years ago that out of this multitude of rabble, could arise a people capable of defying kings?" [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Sarah. In our last minute, Sarah, if you want to get in on this too. I mean, to Lorinda's point, does studying the American Revolution make you wonder about the thorny moral question of when armed revolution in the name of justice is justifiable? Because it seems Americans accept our own revolution casually, certainly by now, but would scrutinize most others very carefully, and be reluctant to endorse?

Sarah Botstein: Yes, really beautifully said, and I think an essential question in studying this history. My hope, actually, is that viewers will not take away an inspiration, or a sense of violence, but a sense of real citizenship, that the founders wanted us to be engaged citizens, and to be involved in our communities, small, medium and large, as we've often been saying.

I hope citizenship is actually the takeaway of the film that our responsibility to a democracy is to have civilized debate, to exercise our rights to vote, to debate our neighbors, to figure out what is best for all the citizens of the land, and to peel back the layers of the onion to really understand what freedoms, liberties, and ideals are central to the American experiment. We can debate those, but some of them are quite inspirational and very clear.

Brian Lehrer: The American Revolution, a six-part PBS docu series. We only sampled from Episode 1, so we don't spoil the ending, so you don't know who won the war, but there you go. Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, big congratulations on this project, and thank you so much for giving us some time today.

Ken Burns: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. You can still catch The American Revolution on your local PBS station. More to come.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

[pause 00:33:19]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We continue our Thanksgiving holiday special with a recent segment we did with Julian Brave NoiseCat. This was on Indigenous Peoples Day/Columbus Day. Thanksgiving, of course, is another holiday where the relationship between European and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is relevant, but often glossed over, and we'll get into more of that with Ken Davis later in the show.

I will note that while in 2021 President Biden became the first president to officially recognize the holiday of Indigenous Peoples Day. This year, President Trump refused to acknowledge it. Instead, he released a fiery statement reclaiming Columbus Day as a federal holiday, and calling the explorer, "The original American hero," without any qualifiers about some other things Columbus may have done.

Let's pick it up here. We are joined now by Julian Brave NoiseCat. He's a writer, filmmaker. You may have seen his Oscar nominated documentary Sugarcane, or heard him speaking to us about it on this show. He's out with a new book, We Survived the Night. The story of North American Indigenous people, through his reporting and his own story, and he's written it in the style of a traditional coyote story, as they call it. We'll ask him what that means. Hi, Julian. Welcome back to WNYC.

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Tsecwínucw-k, Brian, it's always good to be on the air with you.

Brian Lehrer: What's a coyote story?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: A coyote story is a traditional trickster narrative from my people's culture. It's about a forefather of ours called Coyote who was sent to the earth by Creator to set things in order. While he did some good, he was often up to no good. While he filled the rivers with salmon and populated the land with descendants, he used the salmon to marrying into as many native villages along the rivers as he could, because he was a bit of a womanizer, and then he abandoned all of his descendants because he was also a bit of a deadbeat dad, so he's our account of why things are the way they are, and why we are the way they are. I would just add to all that, that you can't tell me that this is not a world still spun around by tricksters and their tricks.

Brian Lehrer: Coyote is not a character, a made-up, paranormal character who Native Americans broadly revere, but rather use as a vehicle to understand the complexity of the world?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Exactly. Yes. He is both an ancestor, and an example of how we are not supposed to be. At least, that was part of the purpose of the stories for the kids. At the same time, he's our account of transformation, and what drives it, and why it happens.

Brian Lehrer: Your book begins with an introduction to your family. Can you give us a bit of your background?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: My father was born in August of 1959 at St. Joseph's Mission. It was the Indian residential school that my family was sent to, to unlearn our Indian ways, and he was discovered just a few moments after his birth in the trash incinerator by the school's night watchman, who described his cries for life as sounding like the noise of a cat, which is a crazy coincidence because, of course, my last name, our last name is NoiseCat, which is actually not the origin of the name, is not that story. It's because the missionaries wrote our name down wrong.

From there, my dad, for probably understandable reasons, if you heard the story, tried to get about as far away from Canim Lake, the Indian reserve that we come from, as he possibly could, so he ended up actually in a suburb outside of New York City, where he met my mom in a bar in Westchester County called the Shadowbrook. She was the bartender. She's an Irish, Jewish, New Yorker, and he took the Golden Feast ladle earring out of his left lobe, and gave it to her at the end of the night, and I guess that's how I came to be. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: You didn't just adopt the name NoiseCat, this was in your father's name?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Yes, so my dad, when you get married, either party in a marriage can actually legally change their name, so when my father married my mother way back, he decided that he was going to reclaim his ancestral name, which was actually also the last name of my great grandmother, the woman who raised him after he was found in the trash incinerator, Alice Newisket, and the name essentially became NoiseCat over time.

Then, through the writing of We Survived the Night, I learned the story of actually my father's birth, and discovery in the trash incinerator, and so the name has of taken on a new meaning in its survival. There's something in there, of course, about Indians in our names as well.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. I see that before turning full time to writing and filmmaking, and now, am I getting this right? Is this you, or is this your father, was a political strategist, policy analyst, and cultural organizer?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: That was me. Yes. I used to do politics. That was my day job before I got to write, and make movies for a living.

Brian Lehrer: What's the context of that? How did you become political, and what kind of politics did you do?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Well, I would say that I was always politicized, because I grew up in a very political place, Oakland, California. A city that has often been on the forefront of progressive cultural and political change in this country, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party, very involved in the history of the United Farm Workers. Of course, also for Native people, a very overlooked looked story is the occupation of Alcatraz by a group called the Indians of All Tribes, which was, to a large extent, a starting point for the contemporary resurgence of Native people.

Actually, during the occupation of Alcatraz, President Richard Nixon, of all people at the time, officially shifted the United States stated policy towards Native people from one of termination, to one of self-determination, which is, last I checked, still the paradigm we're living under today, although, so you got to check the news every day for that one. [chuckles]

I lived in DC. I was for four years before I set about writing We Survived the Night. I was actually also involved in-- I guess, I could say, I originated the idea of making Deb Haaland the first ever Native American cabinet secretary. I had no clue that it would actually happen when I wrote it down on a little white paper type deal, fantasy football style, draft your own progressive cabinet picks, type of document that I helped produce when I was in my 20s. It has always been politics and culture, and why the world changes has always been something that I've been deeply interested in.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and so Deb Haaland, the former member of Congress who then went on to serve, I guess, you might say in the analogy you were giving us, she got through the brackets to get appointed as the 54th United States Secretary of the Interior under Biden, 2021 to the beginning of 2025. This is how you put it in the book, "Once every long while white absurdities become Indian opportunities. It's an old trick." Why did you put it that way?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Well, I put it that way, because I was-- Of all the political outcomes in the broader world, the only one that I could probably ever say that I had some hand in was, was the appointment of Deb Haaland as the first ever Native American cabinet secretary. The truth of the matter is that, she was an outside candidate. Biden was probably going to pick Senator Udall from New Mexico.

In order to get her to that historic appointment, we had to use some outsider activisty type tactics. We had to win a number of persuasive arguments in the political press, and we also had to use a bit of trickery. [chuckles] I would say that Deb made a lot of that of that job as well. She actually related to the story in the book. Inaugurated the first federal inquiry into Native American boarding schools, where we started to finally learn a bit more about what happened at the institutions that Native children were taken to for over a hundred years, and why so much of our culture and language has been lost.

Brian Lehrer: You've piqued the interest of Joan in Manhattan with your description of the coyote myth, and what it means to your nation of Native Americans. I think she has a follow-up question. Joan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Joan: Yes, I wanted to ask. I know there were hundreds of different Native nations, and I'm wondering what other nations might be using as their explanation. What I understood what the coyote is, explains why bad things happen in the world. I'm also making the connection between the Judeo Christian idea of why bad things happen in the world. Adam and Eve did bad things. They have original sin. We're all born with original sin, and then, of course, the Christian idea comes along to rescue everybody, where God sends His son to die for our sins, and we're somehow made okay by that.

I'm curious to know what other traditions there are, and if you see the similarity that every culture maybe has to figure out, why are things not going right all the time? [chuckles] What did we do to deserve this?

Brian Lehrer: Joan, thank you very much for that broad perspective question. Julian, do you have enough grounding in, should we call it comparative theology to answer Joan at all?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: I think most Indians have to be a comparative theologist by birth. That is what colonization impressed upon us, so I'll give it my best shot. My understanding of my people's take on the coyote stories, which I should just say, is that coyote was one of the most prolific tricksters in the history of all North America, and all tricksters.

They told stories about coyote all the way from Central America to Western Canada, and so my people are on the northern end of all of the indigenous peoples across the western half of the continent that told stories about coyote. I think what's really interesting about the trickster stories, rather than being just a straightforward account of good and evil, is that good and evil exist right side-by-side each other, embodied in the actions of the trickster.

At the same time, for example, as coyote leads the salmon up the river, an action that is incredibly consequential in the making of the world, because our people to this day still derive about half of our calories from salmon. This is a really important part of the creation of the world. He's also using that action to his own benefit to marry into, as I said, as many villages along the rivers as will have him, because coyote's a bit of a womanizer. He's always out for his own personal interest, what's best for him, and his legend.

I think that in that account of how transformation happens in the world, I think that there is a very capacious moral understanding of human nature, and the world more broadly. Also, I think a real account of both the good and bad sides of change. I'll just say that I feel that we are currently living in an era of tricksters and tricks once again, and I think that this tradition that has captured the truth of this land in our lives as First Peoples for thousands of years, still has something important to say to humanity, and to the humanities more broadly.

Brian Lehrer: Getting back to politics, this may surprise some listeners. You wrote, "Bipartisan consensus has allowed Indian affairs to remain one of the least polarized areas in American politics." Really?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Yes. I think that, that is a function of one of the things that your listeners might be somewhat aware of about Native people, which is that we're often invisible and erased in non-Native society, and there are lots of negative consequences of that erasure that are very harmful to our people. At the same time, not being fully visible in political discourse can actually have certain benefits in particular moments in time.

One of the ways that, that has functioned sometimes to Native people's benefit in the United States, is that because tribes are often located in very rural and conservative parts of the country, they have to work with Republican representatives in Congress and the Senate, and so when we need more funding for essential social services, we often end up going to the Democratic Party, and then when we need a little bit more freedom from Uncle Sam, who we view as a colonizer, we tend to have a little bit of a common cause with the Republicans who hate big government, because they think that it's meddling in their ability to own guns, and pay too much taxes or whatever.

Brian Lehrer: This might really surprise people that bipartisanship on Native issues isn't just limited to Congress. You wrote about how Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote what is widely considered the most favorable majority decision for tribal treaty rights in at least a generation in the year 2020, the ruling in the case called McGirt v. Oklahoma. You want to remind everybody briefly what that was?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: In 2020, there was a major Supreme Court case that acknowledged that a large swath of what is now the state of Oklahoma, was actually still reservation land under the law, although it had not been recognized as such functionally for many, many decades. What is interesting to me about that ruling in what's called the McGirt case, is that a reading of the law that tends to have a very conservative bent, that is used against abortion rights, that has been used against gay marriage, a originalist take on the law.

When you apply that to texts like treaties with the tribes who signed them with the federal government, giving them access to our lands in exchange for reservations, and social services, it actually has a very favorable reading, because the original text of those treaties said a bunch of stuff that the United States government, as your listeners may be aware, went on to violate at every single turn.

I guess what I find myself often interested in is, not just Native stories, but the way that they illuminate parts of our shared American story in ways that you might not expect, and see if you weren't paying attention closely to what's going on in Indian country.

Brian Lehrer: About the October holiday, listener writes, "It is a terrible mistake to attempt to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Indigenous people should have their day, but not at the expense of Columbus Day, and by close extraction, Italian Americans." What do you say to that? Was coupling these two, the best way to give Indigenous people a day?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: I don't set the calendar for the country, and they don't usually let me pick holidays, so I'm not so sure about whether it should have been the same day, or not the same day. What I can say is that, I think that what we really are arguing about here is narrative and culture, and whose culture gets to be visible. One thing that I find really fascinating about my own people's take on our "discovery" by non-native people is, we tell the story of the first white person to visit us, this fur trader named Simon Fraser, who made a very foolish decision in 1808 to try to take a couple canoes down the roaring Fraser river in what is now British Columbia, Canada, as actually the return of the trickster coyote.

Because it was a very foolish thing to do. It was the end of the spring melt, and so it was like not only a deadly river to begin with, but also the most deadly time to attempt such an ascent of the river. By the time also Fraser reached the bottom reaches of that river, he basically had to resort to piracy, because he'd run out of things to trade, and wrecked all his canoes, and so he had to steal the canoe of a local chief in order to paddle all the way to what is now, basically, Vancouver.

Then, he got turned around and chased back up the river, and the journey was of no commercial use to his fur trading outfit. I think that when you look at the way that these stories are narrated, here's my point of the arrival of white people on this land, who we often saw as tricksters because, of course, they pulled off one of the greatest tricks in human history, stealing an entire continent from its First Peoples. I think that you actually get to understand the story in new, illuminating, and I would also add sometimes entertaining ways.

Brian Lehrer: Julian Brave NoiseCat, writer, Oscar nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, I understand, and student of Salish art and history. His first book, We Survived the Night is now out. Julian, thank you very much for joining us.

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Kukwstsémc, Brian, it's all always a pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More to come. The Brian Lehrer Show is on tape today, so we won't be taking your calls.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Here's something you may, or may not have thought about. The American military, and its profound impact on, of all things modern fashion, our clothing and our accessories. Think about staples like bomber jackets and aviator sunglasses-- Hello, Joe Biden. Cargo pants, not your style. What about a plain cotton T shirt? Well, apparently, soldiers coming back from World War I made it popular to wear them as regular shirts.

Before that, they were considered underwear, or another World War I staple, the wristwatch. In a new installment of a popular podcast, Articles of Interest, our next guest argues, almost all classic menswear is based on 20th century militaria, and that enduring appeal, we'll see it goes all the way back to the founding of the country, says something deeper about the American psyche, and how Americans think about ourselves. Joining us now about the new season on the latest between the US Military and the clothes we all wear, is none other than Avery Trufelman, host of the podcast Articles of Interest. Hey, Avery, welcome back to WNYC.

Avery Trufelman: Hi, Brian. It's good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into how the military has influenced fashion trends today, you start with the history of the military itself, and its relationship to clothing, and you say Americans were always dressing to look more rugged than they were. How far back do you want to go?

Avery Trufelman: Oh, yes. Well, it's funny because I feel like there's this thing, we people get roasted for dressing more rugged than they are, right? For wearing these really hardcore raincoats to go walk the dog, and I just think this is like as American as apple pie. I think that Americans have been dressing like Daniel Boone to go do mundane things since the founding of this country. It's just a part of who we are. It ties back to American military dress since before the United States had a military.

I mean, this is the funny thing about American dress. Our country is so relatively young, it's easy to trace it back. Very long, very interesting story, short. The fascinating thing about the United States is, initially, many of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson included, they were like, "Oh, this country-- Maybe we shouldn't have a military." Maybe a military is a bad idea. Because they were looking back to the early democracies of antiquity, and oftentimes, a standing military, military coups happen all the time, and so they thought, "Maybe we shouldn't have a military, and so we shouldn't have a military uniform. Maybe we should all just wear something called the hunting shirt."

The hunting shirt was this fringy, it's very Daniel Boone looking. It has this fringy outdoorsman looking thing to it, and this is what our militias were supposed to wear, and you were supposed to be able to slide it on over your normal clothes, and grab your gun, and defend your friends and fellow countrymen, and this was supposed to be the everyman shirt that we were all supposed to wear, because we were supposed to be this nation without a military.

Then, that very quickly didn't work out, because we got our butts kicked immediately, and very quickly realized we did need a military, and then we did need a military costume, but it's very interesting. The idea of our clothing, and who we are as a nation, and our military have always been very, very interwoven. Right away we were like, "Oh, we're going to be these scrappy outdoorsmen fighters, not this regimented military." Even though that didn't work out.

Brian Lehrer: For your first episode in this season of Articles of Interest, you head to the headquarters of the clothing brand Buck Mason to meet with their chief designer, Kyle Fitzgibbons, and he shows you their archival collection that he and his design team use as references. Here's a 20 second clip from the podcast.

Kyle Fitzgibbons: If you pick things off of this wall, there's almost every archetype for every modern piece of clothing.

Avery Trufelman: What are we seeing?

Kyle Fitzgibbons: I see flight jackets, bomber jackets, 1950s and '60s automotive car culture jackets, every version of a field jacket, chore jackets. It's all there.

Brian Lehrer: I guess my question, Avery, is do people even realize all the time that they're dressing in military gear, or clothing as fashion? Even you go Back to the 1960s, anti-Vietnam War protesters love to shop at Army Navy stores.

Avery Trufelman: Yes. It's interesting, because I think it went in these waves, right? I think in-- Well, the fascinating thing is, after World War II, that was the giant surplus boom, because everybody thought the Manhattan Project was obviously a secret. No one knew the atomic bomb was coming. Everybody thought World War II was going to go on for years and years and years and years, so the United States military made so much clothing, and that accounted for why there was so much military surplus.

For decades, people just wore these clothes as basics. They almost forgot that they were military clothes. I think for a long time, people just forgot that the pea coat was a military coat. As you said, the T-shirt was underwear. Everybody forgot for decades, until, yes, as you said the anti-war movement. Then, suddenly, there was this giant recollection that, "Oh, yes, these were military clothes, and let's reclaim them as military clothes."

Now, it's this interesting twilight period. You can go to almost any major retailer, Buck Mason included, and they'll have-- I mean, they're still called field jackets, cargo shorts. They look almost exactly like things you would have been able to buy in a surplus store. I just don't know if it's registering to people that these are former military surplus clothes, [chuckles] in many cases, almost copied, at least in the case of Buck Mason, stitch-for-stitch. I think the big difference is that the military surplus store doesn't exist anymore, and the only place you can buy these clothes is in high fashion stores.

Brian Lehrer: Avery Trufelman is my guest, if you're just joining us, host of the podcast Articles of Interest. Her new season relates how much of modern fashion somehow is related to military wear. We're going to play another clip here, and it again goes back to the founding era. You spoke to Joshua Kerner, who's actually an attorney, but you say he moonlights as a deep archival research obsessive.

You talk about one of the earliest battles in the Revolutionary War that happened really close by, the Battle of Brooklyn that was fought near the western edge of Long island in what is now Brooklyn. Let's listen to about a minute from the podcast. This clip starts with the voice of army veteran and author Phil Klay, and ends with the voice of that Joshua Kerner.

Phil Klay: The Hessian mercenaries were professionals at war, and the Americans weren't.

Avery Trufelman: The British had hired German mercenary soldiers, the Hessians, who were ruthless killers for hire.

Phil Klay: At the Battle of Brooklyn, Hessian mercenaries whooped the citizen soldiers pretty badly.

Avery Trufelman: There's this big reconsideration. Maybe we couldn't just rely on militias. Maybe we did need to have an actual regular professional standing army dressed in something a little bit better than linen smocks. Maybe they should be actual uniforms made of actual sturdy wool. They opted to put soldiers in a British-style uniform. What else did they know? Our colonial button-down regimental coats looked basically identical to the red coats, but ours were blue.

Joshua Kerner: We think of army green now, but it used to be army blue was the color of the military.

Brian Lehrer: There's an interesting fact that most people probably don't know. I didn't know it. We do think of green as the essential military clothing color, but it used to be blue?

Avery Trufelman: Yes, it used to be blue. You think about the Civil War; the Union was blue. It was blue for a very long time. The interesting thing is, I spent an ungodly amount of time in Episode 1 going over how it changed. It changed in a war that's not often talked about, which is the Spanish-American War, which is the first war that the United States fights abroad. This is when we shed our signature blue, and it's functionally because it's our first colonial endeavor, and we copy the British. We copy the British khaki that they wore essentially during their colonial campaigns in India during the Raj, and we never let it go.

It's very interesting. We have a long history of copying other countries as we're searching for our identity, and we do it through our military uniforms.

Brian Lehrer: Here's an interesting question from a listener. Tell me if you think this is accurate or if you came upon this in your research. It says, "Military fashion fact. Women's nylon stockings were invented to replace wool stockings because the military needed all the wool for soldiers' uniforms." Do you know that to be true?

Avery Trufelman: Yes, I've come across this fact a lot. There's this whole idea that the United States-- I mean, just the idea that every single facet of every single industry contributed to the war effort in a way that we can't fathom now is another thing that just contributed to almost every single aspect of clothing. That's the other thing. I feel like I've been researching clothing history for years now, and almost every single thing that I've ever touched on really goes back to usually World War II, and sometimes World War I, and it's always stories like this. It's always like something had to be sacrificed [chuckles] for the war effort in this way that we can't fathom now. Yes, I've absolutely come across that fact.

You also come across this other fact that oftentimes, to preserve silk, wedding dresses used to be made out of repurposed old parachutes. All these interesting fun facts of ways people used to scrimp and save and preserve in the name of the war effort. Some are quite apocryphal and some aren't. I, honestly, focus less on the home front and more on the soldier's perspective on this series, so I'm less in a place to speak to that, but it's really true. This is a huge part of the ways that warfare has affected all of our lives and what we wear to this day.

Brian Lehrer: Here is a comment on our 1960s reference from before. A listener writes, "About military surplus clothes. During the anti-Vietnam War era, we consciously chose to wear military-style clothes as everyday wear to make a statement. It was definitely not forgetting that this was military gear." I think that's the point you were making before, right, when I asked the question-

Avery Trufelman: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: -that some of that was very conscious to kind of appropriate military gear into civilian life.

Avery Trufelman: Absolutely. I was saying that there was a generation that was before that era that was just wearing it as basics, until the '60s came along and really remembered that these were military, and were actively emphasizing that these were military clothes. Then the funny thing that came after it was the sort of yuppification of military surplus. The '60s made this rebellious look of military surplus so widely accepted that suddenly, you watch Annie Hall, and Woody Allen is waiting to go to the movies in his field jacket. In Kramer vs. Kramer, Dustin Hoffman is like-- I forget. He's like a lawyer living in Manhattan, wearing his field jacket.

A lot of this actually has to do with the brand Banana Republic which began its life as a surplus store. It began selling surplus clothes and zhuzhing them up, making them a little bit nicer, making them a little bit trendier. There were a lot of stores and boutiques that began their lives like this. It's just that Banana Republic was purchased by Don Fisher, owner of The Gap, but these things became very mainstream. I think that's part of what allowed clothes like the field jacket and these things that we consider basics now—that so obviously represent military clothes—to enter mainstream fashion now, and trickle back down from that spirit of revolution that guided the '60s.

Brian Lehrer: Let's wrap up with this. Although the outdoor industry—hiking, camping, rock climbing, and all the gear that comes with it—is a global trend, you can make the argument that it's most visibly popular in the United States. Is this really an American thing, or is this kind of a global thing?

Avery Trufelman: Well, it's definitely a global thing now, but the American outdoor industry has a very specific look. Obviously, there's a huge outdoor industry with a rich history, especially in Alpine countries in Europe, but the United States has a rich outdoor history that's very much co-shaped by the military. That is a huge part of this history and this series. It's too big a history to go into now, but it's fascinating.

Brian Lehrer: But people can listen to your podcast series and learn a lot more. Avery, thanks for coming-- By the way, is it true that your parents met a generation ago when they were both WNYC employees?

Avery Trufelman: Yes, it's true. I think my mom let you take naps in her office, if I'm not mistaken?

Brian Lehrer: Maybe when I did those double shifts, the night show after the day show. Avery, thanks for coming on and paying the [crosstalk]--

Avery Trufelman: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Articles of Interest is the podcast.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. As our Thanksgiving special continues, now let's talk about the history of how we celebrate the holiday with our 100 Years of 100 Things episode from around Thanksgiving 2024, when, by the way, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade turned 100 years old. That was our 100 years peg. Historian and storyteller Kenneth C. Davis joined us for that, and let's pick it up here.

In this segment, we'll touch on the basics from the 1600s, just because people still get that history wrong—Yes, the immigrants were eating the geese, but the immigrants were the white people—but mostly, we'll trace origins of our modern Thanksgiving traditions. Like, how did Thanksgiving go from being a religious holiday to a secular one? Why did the president get involved in moving Thanksgiving on the calendar and stopping different states from setting their own dates? What happened to states' rights? How did it get pinned to Thursdays?

How did a parade, or a Macy's, get involved in the first place? Spoiler alert. First, it was a different department store chain. No, not Walmart. Where did watching football as a Thanksgiving thing come from? How did Black Friday get tacked on? Why don't we talk much about the Native American side of the story anymore, or get accused of being the woke police at dinner if we do? How did our Thanksgiving gatherings start to fall apart as much as they have, around our polarized politics? I think that traces to the George W. Bush era and predates Trump. We'll see what Ken thinks. Why does Canada celebrate Thanksgiving in October? What's wrong with those people? We'll hear some oral history calls of favorite Thanksgiving stories or traditions.

Joining us now is Kenneth C. Davis, author of the Don't Know Much About History series of books, and his recent great short works of fiction and great short works of nonfiction books. Ken, always great to have you. Happy Thanksgiving, and welcome back to WNYC.

Kenneth C. Davis: It's always a pleasure, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: You want to do a little of the origin story first? The group we usually call the Pilgrims, which sounds so adventurous and wholesome, you also refer to as Separatists, which sounds more dark and rebellious. Why do you use that word?

Kenneth C. Davis: Well, we have to go back here—without unpacking too much of this—to the great schism in Catholic history, starting with Henry VIII splitting with the Church of England. The Church of England, of course, made Henry VIII the head of the church, as well as the head of the country. Certain people within England think that that didn't go far enough. They thought that the Church of England was still too popish, as they would say, and they wanted to purify it. Hence, they became known as Puritans.

There was a smaller sect of Puritans who wanted to go even further. They thought the Church of England was beyond preservation, and so they wanted to literally separate. Of course, to separate from England meant to separate from the king. The king wasn't happy with that. At a certain point, the Separatists, as they were known then, went to Holland, and they lived there in Leiden, in the Netherlands, for 10 years.

Unhappy that their children were growing up more Dutch than English, they decided to go back to England and then join this joint venture that was going to send a couple of ships to the colony of Virginia. This is in 1620 now. Those people were aboard the Mayflower. The second ship, which was called the Speedwell, I believe, proved to be unseaworthy, and so it never left port.

About 60 days at sea for the Mayflower. It's a ship of about 100-feet long. There were 102 passengers packed below decks. There were 32 crew members who mostly lived and worked above decks. It was cramped, crowded, noisy, smelly. They brought chickens, dogs, pigs, and other livestock, as well as themselves. They brought shoes. They brought beer, which was better to drink than plain water. They made this extraordinary voyage, arriving in New England.

New England was pretty well-known to the English by this point. It wasn't like they were the first ones there, and we'll discuss that at greater length. They landed first at the tip of what we call Cape Cod—what is now Provincetown. They actually got off and wandered around Cape Cod for a while; didn't find a suitable place to live, but got back on the ship. Now only half of those people, those 102 passengers-- it was 103 by the time they arrived, because a baby named Oceanus had been born during the voyage.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, Oceanus. That's so appropriate.

Kenneth C. Davis: Half of those passengers were not the people we would call Pilgrims. They were people who were- first of all, some were indentured servants, some were hired guns, like Myles Standish, who was a soldier, and a soldier of fortune of sorts, and he was going to provide the new colony's defense. Some were just people coming for an opportunity to get a piece of land in this new world, this New England, because most of the land in England was either in the hands of the Church or the aristocracy.

It was a joint stock venture [chuckles] as it started out. Over time, of course, we came to call all of these people Pilgrims. That was a name that was applied to them later on by one of their company, the very famous Governor William Bradford. That's how the First Comers, as they were also known, later came to be called the Pilgrims.

Brian Lehrer: I love that baby name. I didn't know that. They named the baby Oceanus. I love that. Also, everybody knows the name of the ship, the Mayflower, but I never knew, until you just said it, the other one was the Speedwell, which I think would make a great model of bicycle. The Trek Speedwell. 21 speed.

Kenneth C. Davis: Much better than the Mayflower.

Brian Lehrer: You say the Pilgrim's Thanksgiving was originally the opposite of a day to feast. It was a day to fast. Why was that?

Kenneth C. Davis: That's exactly right. To the Pilgrims, to these very, very strict, devout people who believed that church was really just meant to be a solemn time, about three hours long, with a long sermon, which would usually talk about how you were destined to die in hell, they would have thought of Thanksgiving as a day of prayer and fasting. What we call Thanksgiving—the First Thanksgiving, even though we can discuss this too—it's far from the First Thanksgiving in America. This would have simply been a harvest festival. A harvest feast.

Most likely the one we celebrate as the First Thanksgiving happened in 1621, and it happened probably in October, although there's no certainty of the date. We only have a few very sparse records about what actually happened that day. Again, partly thanks to Governor Bradford, who wrote the first history, Of the Plimoth Plantation, and another document from that period which described this harvest feast. First of all, it lasted three days. You think your Thanksgiving dinner goes on a little bit too long? Three days, and there were only about 50 people there.

About half of the Mayflower passengers died during the first terrible year. They died of exposure, disease, perhaps an epidemic of some kind of plague, which was quite commonplace in that part of the world, and especially to the Native people who were living there. That's another part of this story.

Brian Lehrer: I read on the Encyclopedia Britannica site that the First Thanksgiving feast didn't feature turkey, so much as ducks and geese, because ducks and geese were more plentiful in that part of Massachusetts and an easy kill. How did turkey get pinned as the Thanksgiving main dish for the ages?

Kenneth C. Davis: Okay, there's a lot to unpack here, but let's talk about what they did eat on the so-called First Thanksgiving. We'll call it the First Thanksgiving. First of all, it was much more of what I guess we would describe as surf and turf, because there they were on the shores of the Atlantic. The ocean waters were teeming with fish. Cod, mussels, clams—maybe, lobster—were on the menu, for sure. There would have been wild game. We don't know precisely which birds were considered wild game, but certainly, ducks, geese, and perhaps turkey, but wild turkey—very different from the turkey we're familiar with this year.

There would have been cranberries, but not in cranberry-

Brian Lehrer: Sauce.

Kenneth C. Davis: -sauce or jelly or jam. There would have been raw cranberries put into what they would have called a salad. There would have been beans, squash, and corn, the Three Sisters of Native American tradition, because indeed the Native Americans helped keep these settlers alive. We should come back to that story in a bit too.

How did we get to the turkey dinner? That really belongs to a woman that most people have never heard her name, but she's, in a way, one of the most significant women in American history in some respects. Her name is Sarah Josepha Hale. She was a novelist. She wrote a very early anti-slavery novel. She was from New England, and she then became the editor, for many decades, of a magazine called Godey's Lady's Book. This was, I suppose you would call it, the Good Housekeeping of its day. Perhaps more appropriately, she was the Martha Stewart of her day.

Sarah Josepha Hale began a campaign of writing to every president, for nearly 30 years, to establish a national day of Thanksgiving. She thought that the country needed one. As the country moved towards war in the 1850s, and then finally in 1861, she believed that this idea would be a unifying celebration of all things, to her mind, American. She was very, very influential in the sense that Abraham Lincoln eventually caves, in 1863, and says, okay, I'll make a proclamation.

It was Sarah Josepha Hale who really established what the Thanksgiving meal would look like. In the early 19th century, it was remarkably like what we think of today as the Thanksgiving meal, although no lasagna or mac and cheese.

Brian Lehrer: The Natives, the Wampanoags, they weren't invited guests to what we usually call the First Thanksgiving in 1621. They just kind of showed up?

Kenneth C. Davis: That's correct. Led by their chief, who goes by the name Massasoit, although that may have actually been a title rather than his name. Massasoit shows up with 90 warriors. Governor William Bradford describes this. Very good guess. They go out and kill five deer. There was certainly venison also on that First Thanksgiving. I don't know if venison steaks is on anybody's menu, but it would be very, very historically appropriate. Then there were three days of feasting.

By the way, there were only four women who survived that first year from the Mayflower. Obviously, they were responsible for all of the cooking for 100-plus people. Bradford describes that there were games of running and wrestling, and they also demonstrated the use of their muskets, which was probably more a message, a not-so-subtle message that we have these muskets—which they, of course, had carried across on the Mayflower—and we know how to use them.

Brian Lehrer: Not to gloss over the tough stuff; the era of good feeling that ensued after that didn't last all that long. There was a series of wars later that century that almost wiped out the colonists, and then mostly did wipe out the Wampanoag. Correct?

Kenneth C. Davis: This is very, very correct. It's the son of that chief, Massasoit, whose name was Metacom, but the English had decided to call him King Philip, and he had a brother who they also anglicized his name. Maybe 30 or 40 years after the First Thanksgiving, the Native people could see that these waves and waves of Puritan- became more Puritan than Pilgrim settlers coming into New England were appropriating their land, they were converting Native people to Christianity.

The first book published, the first Bible published in New England or in North America was a Bible published in one of the Native languages, an Abenaki language. Converting these people was very, very important to the Pilgrims and later Puritans. There were religious differences. There was the appropriation of land, which was usually done in fairly sneaky ways. The era of good feelings that started in 1621 was certainly gone 50 years later, and a terrible, long, deadly war called King Philip's War swept over much of Massachusetts and the rest of New England, decimating the Native population by as much as 80%, and also almost wiping out the Anglo-American settlers at the time.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to segue now from some of the origin story of Thanksgiving, which Kenneth C. Davis has written about so beautifully in various places, and just described so beautifully. We're going to get into 100 Years of 100 Things this Thanksgiving, 100 years of how we celebrate Thanksgiving.

Moving more toward the present, Ken, how did Thanksgiving go from being a religious holiday to a secular one?

Kenneth C. Davis: That's a really good question and an important question. I think we talked about Lincoln and the first Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863. Other presidents, from Washington forward, had made Thanksgiving proclamations. Had nothing to do with the Pilgrims, had nothing to do with the foundation myth. They were truly days of thanksgiving. Washington declares one, I think in 1789, in gratitude for the Constitution. James Madison declares one after the War of 1812, that the war has ended.

There had been these sporadic ones, but as I said, Sarah Josepha Hale had really lobbied presidents for years. Finally, Lincoln does it in 1863. I'll just briefly cite from Lincoln's 1863 proclamation. "It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledge with one heart and one voice by the whole American people"—again, this idea of bringing the country together—"I do, therefore, invite my citizens, and also those who are at sea, and those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday, November, as a next day of Thanksgiving and Praise. And I recommend that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His care all those become widows."

The following year, he has a similar message, that we should really spend this day set apart, and again, Lincoln's words, "Humble yourselves in the dust and thence offer up penitent and fervent prayers and supplications to the Great Disposer of events for a return of the inestimable blessings of peace, union, and harmony throughout the land." Clearly, in Lincoln's mind, this was thanking Providence, as he would have used it, thanking God. This was very much the tradition that had come down through Sarah Josepha Hale.

The Puritans who settled New England and then really flourished, of course, and spread out across the country. They had taken this tradition, which they had first called Founders Day, which hearkened back to the Pilgrim's arrival, and then the Puritans who followed them. This was very much a Puritan- we could call it a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, New England tradition. They really did spread this across most of the North. The Southern states did not have the same traditions; a very different tradition of which Englishmen went to the South—one of the other main differences between the two parts of the country.

I think that there's no simple answer to your question, Brian. That it's like a lot of things in American life; eventually, they become secularized. Certainly, the fact that more immigrants were coming into the country, bringing their own traditions, bringing their own faith. Certainly, the late 19th century saw many Irish come into the country. They were not welcome, for the most part. They were followed by Italians, who were also not welcome. Certainly, by the early 20th century, Thanksgiving had become much more of a holiday celebration, much the way we think of it today. Nobody is going to humbly ask for penitence while they're sitting down to dinner.

Brian Lehrer: To that point, kind of, listener writes, "I'm grateful that Thanksgiving is a secular holiday. As someone from a large New Jersey family that's part Jewish, part Italian, part Irish, it's nice to have one holiday with no religious overtones."

Someone else writes, "A story. One Thanksgiving morning, I walked onto a packed Metro-North train at Grand Central. I saw a few people with food trays on their laps looking straight ahead and apprehensive like they were going to Sing Sing prison. I found the last seat just in time, and I said to the young woman next to me, 'Going to see the relatives?' And she gaffed, 'Uh-huh.' I had two bottles of wine and one vodka. Let's just say, me and two other passengers had an interesting breakfast. We were zooming up the tracks by the time we got to White Plains." [chuckles]

I think this is a good segue to Marie in Stephentown, New York. Marie, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in. Happy Thanksgiving.

Marie: Thank you. Happy Thanksgiving to you too, Brian. I was a conductor in the Long Island Rail Road for 20-plus years. I worked my share of Thanksgivings. Long story short, if it weren't for family making the turkey, I don't know what my kids would have eaten, as I was a single parent, but I just want everyone, as they're going about their business, think about the bus drivers, the cops, the firefighters, the train conductors, the engineers, and everyone who is working to get you where you need to go safely, and just spare a thought for those people, and maybe thank them. It means a lot.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you called with that. I do try to say, when I talk about long holiday weekends and things like that, for those of you who are off, and for those of you who are working to make the long holiday weekend as pleasant as possible for the rest of us, thank you, thank you, thank you. Marie, thank you for all your service on the Long Island Rail Road. Yes, let's, everybody, remember that as like that person who texted, Marie, who was on the Metro-North train-

Marie: I was on the Metro-North. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: -with those people who weren't happy to be going to their relatives. All right, thank you very much.

Kenneth C. Davis: Brian, could I jump in just for a second there?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Please.

Kenneth C. Davis: Because I think that one of the texts you read talked about a blended family. That's why Thanksgiving, I think, is-- maybe Christmas is still more popular and it's also been very secularized, but Thanksgiving, I think, a lot of people feel the way that the text meant. Every successive group has come and either been welcomed or not, but eventually, they become part of the American society.

This is a tradition that I think crosses all boundaries. Maybe the vegans really don't like it, but [chuckles] we've tried our share of tofu turkeys over the year, but that's another story. I do think it's this very, very American idea. Despite our differences, and there are many right now, people still see this as just the way Sarah Josepha Hale envisioned it; as a way to bring Americans together.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I am thankful that at the age of 72, I still have the ability to serve my community as an EMS first responder." Another one-- We're getting so many on those essential workers who have to work these holidays. Another one writes, "I'm from Warwick, New York, and I'm so grateful for all the firefighters and emergency workers who worked so hard to preserve our homes from the Jenny Creek Fire. Really was an amazing effort by all."

It wasn't just WNYC that was born in 1924. It was also, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, born on November 27th, 1924. Ken, how did parades get involved in Thanksgiving? First, it was a different department store, not Macy's, and not in New York, right?

Kenneth C. Davis: That's correct. The real first Thanksgiving Parade actually belongs to Philadelphia, and it was Macy's old competitor, Gimbels, that was behind it. The Macy's parade begins in 1924. Very important to-- First of all, we have to look back at what was going on. United States had just come through the end of World War I in 1918, plus, something we've discussed a number of times, Brian, the influenza of 1918. The country had been traumatized by these two events, just as we know that we've been traumatized over the past few years.

Things had slowly been returning to normal. America had really retreated into a more of an isolationist stand. There was a lot of anti-immigrant mood. One of the other signal events of 1924 is the passage of an immigration act that included Chinese and many other Europeans, including Italian [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Excluded. That excluded.

Kenneth C. Davis: Yes, excluded. Forgive me.

Brian Lehrer: We did another 100 years segment on that law and how it changed America. It shut down the Ellis Island era at that time, et cetera, but go ahead.

Kenneth C. Davis: Extremely important. What's interesting is that most of the employees at Macy's, at that time, were largely immigrants, fairly recent immigrants. The idea for the parade, which had started, as we said, in Philadelphia, Macy's decided to do it in 1924. The employees, many of them recent arrivals or recent immigrants, had a tradition of a grand parade, usually at harvest time in the fall. This fit in with a European tradition. The Macy's employees were the first marchers in that first parade, which began up in Harlem, and then came all the way down to Herald Square.

This speaks a little bit to what you asked before, about going from a religious holiday to a secular one. I think that the Macy's parade didn't do it, but it emphasized how this holiday was moving from a religious one to a more secular one. That also ushered in, as we know, the holiday season, because bringing up the tail end of the parade in 1924 was Santa Claus, who was then installed in Macy's. That is part of American legend as well. In fact, The New York Times said that this was- Santa was being crowned as the Kiddie King of Christmas at the Macy's parade. There were no balloons at that time, but there were floats, horse-drawn floats.

That was the beginning of this unbroken-- except for World War II. Was interrupted during World War II because they couldn't use helium for the balloons, and there was a shortage of rubbers for the tires for the floats, and just the sense that we shouldn't be having this parade while we're in the midst of a war.

Brian Lehrer: I guess in 1924, there was no Bluey balloon, or Diary of a Wimpy Kid balloon, or Pikachu balloon. Marie in Manhattan has a parade story. You're on WNYC. Hi, Marie.

Marie 2: Hi. I used to take a friend- a classmate of my daughter and her two siblings to the parade. I was a single parent at the time. Their mother was so grateful. She always invited us for Thanksgiving dinner. One year, instead of standing out in the cold, we were invited upstairs to a relative's apartment on 72nd Street in Central Park West, so we saw the whole parade from beginning to end. One of those kids was named Cindy, and she decided that she was going to learn how to juggle, to teach herself how to juggle. She became a juggle champion known as Cindy Marvell. It was a wonderful memory.

We also got to know a guy who showed up every year, named Duke Rottnek. He would call out [chuckles] to all the celebrities passing by, "My name is Duke. This is me, Duke." At some point, we would start to yell to the celebrities who were going by, "Hey, don't forget about Duke Rottnek. He's right here with us." [chuckles] They'd all look over and wonder about whom we were speaking. It was just so wonderful and so charming to be able to do that, and a very treasured memory.

Brian Lehrer: Nice story, Marie. Thank you very much. Chris in Lexington, New York, has a story too. Chris, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Chris: Hello. Yes, my family is immigrants from Belgium. The first year or a couple years we were in the United States, my grandfather came around Thanksgiving. He was a professionally trained chef from Belgium. My mother explained to him that in the United States, it was customary, around this time, for people to do a turkey, an entire turkey, which was kind of rare in Belgium. He says, "Turkey? Okay, not a problem." My mother put the turkey on the table in front of him, the kitchen table. He sat down, and with a very small knife, he went in and he deboned the turkey from the inside out without breaking the skin. Not the legs, obviously, but the entire body cavity. All that. He just cut all the bones out without breaking the skin, and then my mother put the stuffing in, cooked it, and then we could just kind of slice it like as if it was a giant turkey loaf.

Brian Lehrer: And so, you are Americans now. [chuckles]

Chris: Oh, yes. Yes, we are Americans now. That's how he dealt with a turkey.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, thank you. Thank you very much. Ken, where did watching football as a Thanksgiving thing come from? I think it was college football at first, before the NFL, right?

Kenneth C. Davis: It was indeed college football. Princeton played Yale on Thanksgiving in 1876. Now, the Canadians seem to want to-- just as they have a different Thanksgiving Day, they seem to want to take some credit for the introduction of football. We'll leave that for another show, sometime. Again, this is part of the secularization, I think, of Thanksgiving. That Thanksgiving became a very big traditional day of college, and then eventually high school football games.

When the NFL came along, which wasn't until around 1920 or so, some of the teams started to play on Thanksgiving, but not regularly because the day was still shifting around. Remember, this was not a national holiday yet. We haven't talked about that. Didn't really become a national holiday until 1941. The Detroit Lions owner owned a radio station, and he went to the NFL and said, "I'd like to do a real game on Thanksgiving Day," in 1934, and the NFL agreed. Because of the connection to his radio station, which is WJR in Detroit, NBC then agreed- I think it was NBC, agreed to also broadcast the Thanksgiving game. That became Detroit's annual event; a Thanksgiving Day game.

For many years, not to discourage any Detroit fans out there, but watching Detroit on Thanksgiving was not a gift for a long time, but they had the day to themselves until about the 1960s. The NFL went to the teams and said, we want to have a second game on Thanksgiving, because it proved popular. People were sitting around the house and not having anything to do, so they could watch a football game. The Dallas Cowboys then became the second team to get an annual home game on Thanksgiving Day. They've since added a third game as well.

The tradition is a very, very old one, that predates professional football, and was a very big deal. In fact, we haven't talked about Franksgiving, but there was a year when Thanksgiving was moved around a little bit by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a lot of the teams were upset because he was moving the day they had already scheduled their games. This caused considerable upset in 1939.

Brian Lehrer: Didn't FDR move Thanksgiving specifically to boost the economy by moving the date back a week, third week of November instead of the fourth week, so the Christmas shopping season could start earlier during the Depression?

Kenneth C. Davis: That's exactly right. It had been-- Because Lincoln had set it on the last Thursday in November, and this was a presidential proclamation, not a national holiday, but it certainly had the effect of making that pretty much the National Day of Thanksgiving. The merchants, including the head of Macy's—it was the midst of the Depression—came to Roosevelt and said-- it was a very late Thanksgiving, as it is this year, and they said, "Please move your proclamation up a week to the third Thursday in November."

Roosevelt agreed because it didn't really matter that much to him, but we can fight about everything in America politically, and so they thought about the Day of Thanksgiving in 1939. Some states, the governors said, no, we're going to keep it where it was. There were 48 states at the time. I think 25 went to Roosevelt's and 13 stayed with the original. There was a Democratic and a Republican Thanksgiving that year. The Democratic one was derided as Franksgiving—like Franklin D. Roosevelt—and so it caused considerable consternation, but that really prompted Congress then to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, which they did in 1940, but it was then celebrated and set on the fourth Thursday in November, where it is today.

Brian Lehrer: It feels like we should have separate Democratic and Republican Thanksgivings again. Do you agree with my memory that this era of, oh, I can't stand to go because we're so divided on politics, how can I talk to my- I think it was, Bush-loving uncle, when this really got started, in the modern era, around the time of the Iraq War, and people so polarized around that?

Kenneth C. Davis: That's a good question, Brian. I can't remember-- because I don't think it had quite the element of what social media has meant now, that we're talking so much about how I don't want to talk to my uncle at the table, or the other day, The Times had a column about, "My mother voted for Trump. How am I going to talk to her on Thanksgiving?"

It really became, I think, a more heightened issue in the last 10 years or so, but it may indeed go back to some of the divisions, and certainly then the divisions that happened in 2000 over the election. That was hanging over the Thanksgiving of the year 2000, that the election was still basically undecided.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I am grateful. I had the pleasure of hosting a public talk at NYU with the Indigenous culinary anthropologist and chef, Claudia Serrato. I am grateful to Dr. Serrato for her work on Indigenous food sovereignty and re-indigenizing American cuisine, and for sharing her knowledge, experience, and wisdom with the world."

Ken, we just have like 30 seconds left. I did say in the intro, we would ask why Canada celebrates its Thanksgiving in October. What's wrong with those people? Is it because the fall harvest season is just earlier up there?

Kenneth C. Davis: No. It's more appropriate to the original American idea of Thanksgiving, but their Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the Pilgrims either. It didn't come about until the late 19th century. They created a day of Thanksgiving because the Prince of Wales had recovered from an illness.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, wow.

Kenneth C. Davis: This traditional idea of harvest festival was there as well. It was established there. They also wanted to keep it away from November 11th—our Veterans Day; in Canada, Remembrance Day—which is, of course, the day that the World War I ended.

Brian Lehrer: Well, maybe if we keep allowing global warming to expand, we'll have to move Thanksgiving to the day before Christmas. That's 100 Years of 100 Things. 100 years of how we celebrate Thanksgiving. Ken, thanks for today. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Kenneth C. Davis: Pleasure, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Listeners, to all of you, from me, a big thank you. One more Thanksgiving treat to come. Up next, it's familects: your calls about made-up words that only your family says, like family and dialect. Maybe you'll coin some new ones at the table today. Who knows? Stay with us. It's the Best of Brian Lehrer Show on tape today, so we won't be taking your calls.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. What are some made-up words that only your family says? Why do we ask this? Well, there was a story in The Washington Post about how families have made-up words that only they use. It's like a family dialect. Linguists call this a familect. There's actually a linguist word for those words that have come up only in your family. Often, because a little kid mispronounces something, or something like that. They call it a familect. Many words in the family lexicon pop up when kids mispronounce something and then stick, or just make up a word when kids are really little, and then those words linger in the family for years, maybe generations.

Few examples from the article, and I'll throw one in from me, Dipadee, D-I-P-A-D-E-E. I think I'm saying it right. Dipadee: for any condiment that you dunk your food into, like ranch or ketchup. Dipadee. Noonoos for noodles. Bye-bye, meaning literally go to sleep, but also figuratively, as in, "My computer went bye-bye." I have one from a branch of my family where someone, as a little kid, called the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the Nazonazo, so it became the Nazonazo Bridge forever.

Everybody has these stories of made-up words that only your family says. Let's just cut through a bunch of these. Misha in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Get us started. Hi, Misha.

Misha: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. A word that was used a lot in my family when someone annoyed you was uj, so they were an uj.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much for not being an uj. Monique in Tarrytown, you're on WNYC. Hi, Monique.

Monique: Hi. Good morning. We use the word peek-peek in order to say Windex for the glass tabletop in the kitchen. Onomatopoeic for the Windex.

Brian Lehrer: Because that's the sound that it makes when you spray it, yes?

Monique: That's right, so you peek-peek the table.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. John in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: The in-laws have a word we've been trying to find the root of for many years. It's called mudgel and it's like a mudgel. Put a little mudgel in of something into a recipe. Sometimes you could mudgel into a conversation. It's a little of something. Any ideas?

Brian Lehrer: Of what the origin might be? No. Maybe it was one of those things that some little kid said. Some of the texts coming in. Gaborka: meaning, nothing. Dishy for dishwasher. Foofing for sighing, "He foofed." Gungalunga for when something is delicious, "It's so gungalunga." Blipper for TV remotes, "Pick up the blipper." Toestickers for flip-flops.

Michael in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hey, Brian. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Michael: Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Michael: We call that part of your anatomy between your nostrils that runs to your top lip, we call that your schnoodle.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for using your noodle and your schnoodle to call in with that. Peg in Montclair, you're on WNYC. Hello?

Peg: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Our word phrase, originated by my mother, it was and is, skinny finger. That means a small amount of something, usually food. My son, when he was around 10 years old, he went to a birthday party, and he did not care for cake. When they asked him, "Oh, how much would you like?" He said, "Oh, just a skinny finger." They looked at him [chuckles] like he was crazy.

Brian Lehrer: And that became the family word for the small piece of cake or pie that you would take. Got it. David in Manhattan, what's the familect word?

David: A longtime listener, frequent caller, Brian. Two words. One was my creation. When I was a little kid, I used to call anything that was really soft, and it became a family word, bougie. Like, the coat of a dog or a cat or a mink is bougie. The other was my mother's favorite appellation for a town in the middle of nowhere, which was snippachuck.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Off to snippachuck. Dan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Dan.

Dan: Hey. Hi. When I was a kid, my father, if somebody passed gas, he would say, "I believe somebody expoculated." I thought that was a real word for a long time.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for explaining expoculation, I think. Peter in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Peter.

Peter: Hi, Brian. How are you? I have a special word in the family for a particularly delicious piece of meat or the cheek of a fish. We call it knurkle. K-N-U-R-K-L-E, knurkle.

Brian Lehrer: Knurkle. I hope you have a nice piece of nurkle for lunch. One along the same lines in a text. That'll be the last one. Listener writes, "One of my nephews calls fried mozzarella sticks, 'Cheesarella sticks.' The whole family has adopted it since." Thanks for your family dialect examples.

On this Thanksgiving Day, a big thank you to the people behind the scenes who make this show possible. The Brian Lehrer Show's producers are Lisa Allison, Mary Croke, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Our interns this term are Miranda Santos and Amanda DeJesus. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our Daily Politics Podcast, and Megan Ryan is the head of Live Radio. Juliana Fonda is at the audio controls most days, along with Milton Ruiz, and sometimes Shayna Sengstock, Matt Marando, Amber Bruce, Miyan Levenson, Bill O'Neill or Jason Isaac. A big thank you to everyone working today, everyone working anywhere today to make everyone else's playtime possible.

Stay tuned for All Of It.

 

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