As columnists remind us every year, there are a lot of problems with Thanksgiving — the glorification of settler-colonialism; the tense dinners with relatives; turkey. But long before the current crop of debunkers and kvetchers, the dean of American studies, Perry Miller, who died in 1963, identified what he saw as the holiday’s original sin: its abandonment of the logic of Puritan days of thanksgiving, which were held in gratitude for good harvests, good weather, the cessation of disease, the avoidance of shipwreck — and which had their opposite in days of humiliation, desperate fasts imposed whenever things went wrong. Things were going wrong most of the time. Early on, as Miller explains in
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