 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this virtual book talk with Denise Kearn and author of We Gather Together, a nation divided, a president in turmoil and a historic campaign to embrace gratitude and grace. Today's program is presented in partnership with the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, and we thank them for their support. Our annual Thanksgiving holiday is just two days away. This year will be very different from past years as we attempt to adapt to a national health crisis, but the core idea of a day of Thanksgiving remains the same, taking time to reflect and express gratitude. In her book, We Gather Together, Denise Kearnen looks back over centuries of the concept of showing gratitude as a community. In her own nation, presidents have declared national days of Thanksgiving, but not as a regular recurring holiday until President Abraham Lincoln. The National Archives holdings contain the first U.S. Thanksgiving proclamation by George Washington in 1789 and subsequent ones through the presidency of Barack Obama. Lincoln's 1863 proclamation is there as well and has a central role in the book about which we are about to hear. In the mid-19th century, Sarah Joseph Ahale campaigned for decades for an annual day of Thanksgiving observed throughout the United States. She finally had success with President Lincoln. His three-page proclamation written in the midst of the Civil War began with an expression of gratitude for a year filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and helpful skies and concluded with an appeal to God to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union. Since then, we have set aside a day of national Thanksgiving every November to stop and consider what makes us truly thankful. Now it is my pleasure to welcome our guest. Denise Kiernan is an author, journalist, and producer. Her best-selling books include The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City. She has also worked in television serving as head writer for ABC's Who Wants to be a Millionaire during its Emmy award-winning first season. Karen Abbott is the author of best-selling books including American Rose and The Ghosts of Eden Park. She has appeared on the History Channel, CBS Sunday Morning, and the Discovery Channel. Now let's turn to Denise Kiernan and Karen Abbott. Thank you for joining us today. And thank you for joining us during this holiday week. I'm very excited to be talking about Denise Kiernan's fantastic new book, We Gather Together. And we have a lot to talk about. It's going to be a fun time tonight. And Denise and I are all very good friends as well as longtime writing partners. And we always talk about the fact that the world in which we begin a book rarely resembles the world in which the book is published. And I don't think that that's as true for any other book as much as it is for We Gather Together. The world has changed drastically since you first began this book. I'd love for you to start out by talking about the germ of this idea and how the idea evolved and how did your work evolve as the world was really drastically changing around us. Thank you. That's a great question to start with. And thank you so much, David Ferriero. I've had the delight of meeting the Archivist of the United States on several occasions. And thanks to the National Archives for putting this together. And thanks to Abbott for joining in with me on what is the weirdest book tour I've ever had in my life. So yeah, I mean, I think a lot of times people don't realize that as writers, we come up with these germs of ideas, as you said, and we're not maybe sure it's going to be a book. So for me, I came across the story of Sarah Giuseppe Hale, this, you know, this woman, this 19th century media maven who campaigned for a national day of thanks. I came across her story years ago while I was working on another book. But as you know, and people who read my books, now I don't necessarily do straight up biographies. So I just, but I was so compelled by this woman's story. I did what I always do, which is start a file, right? I have written files, I have email files, post-its, running around the office. And I sort of set it aside. And, you know, I'm always, as a writer, kind of more interested in the intersection of stories and characters and events, as much or even more so than the individual characters and events themselves. And the intersection between Sarah Giuseppe Hale and Abraham Lincoln, certainly was fascinating to me. The intersection between the Civil War and the establishment of the American National Day of Thanks that has continued to what we know to be Thanksgiving today, that intersection was interesting. And the intersection between Sarah Giuseppe Hale and so many other writers and media personalities, that was interesting. But to me, there was still kind of something missing. And I wasn't quite ready to do this book. And on a personal level, and also as a researcher and someone interested in science, I have found the last decade or so, the research that's been done into gratitude and having a gratitude practice has been really fascinating to me. And the last self-care industry. Exactly. But you know, what's so interesting is that in the last decade or so, there is hard scientific research on a neurological level that looks at the mental, the emotional, and even the physical benefits to having a gratitude practice. And I thought, well, gosh, that's, I mean, that's what a Thanksgiving is. That's what a Thanksgiving has been since humans have walked the earth. The idea that we're going to take time to appreciate that which has been given to us. And to me, the whole the gratitude piece was kind of the linchpin for me. So I wanted to look at American history, in a sense, through the lens of our relationship to gratitude and giving thanks. And but, but still, even though once I decided that's how I wanted to do the book, you know, you do your outlines, I'm a big outliner. Some people are looking into the craft. Yeah, I'm a big outliner. And, you know, you tweak your outline, you talk to your editor gets tweaked again, you write it, you revise it, you revise it again. And like you said, I mean, the world is different, you know, from when you conceive a book to when it hits the shelves. But oh my gosh, when I was proofing a book titled We Gather Together and the phrase social distancing was what's trending, I just thought, what, you know, what is going on? And yeah, it was, it was, it was pretty surreal. This has been a pretty surreal experience for me. We gather together for zoom. But that's kind of the point, right? I mean, yeah, what she was saying, you know, people in the 19th century couldn't necessarily be in the same room with people all over the country or all over the world. But Sarah just have a hail thought it would still be powerful and moving and unifying. If everybody just sort of knew on that one day, everybody in their country was going to get together and take a minute to just say thank you. Now, before we get into Sarah, because she's such a rich, fascinating, fabulous character, I just want to say that I some of my favorite parts of the book are your own first person experiences. You have such a witty, wonderful, funny voice, and really insightful anecdotes, I think that really sort of bolster the larger idea that you're presenting about a new kind of Thanksgiving story. If you could just tell some of your favorite experiences of celebrating Thanksgiving abroad, and that whole situation. Yes, you know, I love I love Thanksgiving. And I want to feel good about what Thanksgiving is, which was one of the impetuses for writing this book. But I've lived abroad a couple times in my life. I've lived in France briefly, and I've lived in Italy twice. And to me, it's always interesting how American I feel when I'm not in America, like how much of an American I feel when I'm not here. And I've lived in Rome twice, Rome, Italy. It's a very special place to me. And trying to have Thanksgiving, you want to go have it's Thanksgiving, and you think to yourself, Well, it's the end of November, I've got it. It's Thanksgiving, right? I've got to have Thanksgiving, and you get your ex Pat friends together. And then you realize, you know, when I lived in Rome, which is more years ago than I need to share. But the Oh, my gosh, cranberries, they don't get what are cranberries, they don't find cranberries. You're trying to contact people who know people at the food and agriculture organization. It's like an underground, it's like cranberry smuggling underground. But it was really it was it was a really unique moment. And then, you know, I remember having this very strange Thanksgiving in Paris, and at a French friends apartment. And we went looking for a turkey and le donned. And we found one. And we looked at this turkey. And I thought that is the smallest turkey I've ever seen in my life. And we get it all the way back to my friends apartment. And it won't fit in the oven. And so we have to cook this turkey and the oven door won't shut. And turkeys take long enough with like the oven door shut. Yeah, but it was just one of those things where you where you thought there is there is something about this holiday that that speaks to me and continues to. But I was really interested in it. You know, I've known for a while that the history we grew up with with Thanksgiving, right, odd as kids wasn't real and on point. And I wanted to I wanted to dig into that. And, and then you know, and then putting together Sarah Giuseppe Hill's piece with the Civil War, just really kind of made this holiday that I already enjoyed just feel a little a little truer. And in a sense, you know, the concept of and I get into this in the book, I talk about ancient Rome. I talk about all of these, you know, thanksgivings that, you know, by years and years and years predate anything we've conceived of on this continent. Right. You know, they're, they're meaningful. And you can kind of see that I kind of described it as an evolution. Yeah, well, let's talk about Sarah Giuseppe Hill. She's a huge part of this book, a fascinating woman, a flawed woman, a complicated woman. Tell me about a little bit about her origins. And how did the the idea for Thanksgiving become this driving force in her life? And how did she go about accomplishing this and, and you know, bringing it all the way to the to the Lincoln White House? So what's so you know, we have this, the word Thanksgiving, the practice of Thanksgiving, like I said, goes back, you know, almost till till since humans have walked the earth. Sarah Giuseppe Hill grew up in the early 19th century in in America. Her father was a Revolutionary War veteran. So she grew up with a very strong and he was injured during the Revolutionary War, she grew up with a very strong love of what it meant for the United States of America to exist. Yeah, she also, you know, she grew up, it was a difficult time. An older brother was lost at sea. She lost her mother and a sister, you know, at a young age. And, you know, she didn't have the benefit of what, you know, we would consider to be education. However, she did consider herself lucky to grow up in a house where they loved books and loved reading. And they did so voraciously. One of her older brothers had the benefit of going off to Dartmouth to study when he came home, he would share what he learned with his sister, Sarah. I thought that was really touching. He was invested in her education. It was so lovely. And you could really see how important those kinds of conversations and reading and discussion of all those things were in her life. And then she married a man, David Hale, who, you know, also saw in her this, this woman who loved to write, this woman who loved to read, they had study hour every night between eight and 10, they would sit in their parlor and they would talk about French or they would talk about botany or books they were interested in. And Sarah's husband, David, knew she wrote and didn't just encourage her to keep writing, encouraged her to put her work out into the world. And this is the 1820s. And she does. And she sadly loses him early on in their marriage. He got pneumonia, which was is still a killer, but was definitely a killer then. And she was a widowed mother of five and needed to make a living. And she started putting her work out into the world. And she wrote a novel in 1827 called Northwood that got enough attention to get her a position as the editor of a ladies magazine. And in that novel, she shares a scene, it's a fictional, it's a fictional book, but there is a scene almost an entire chapter dedicated to a Thanksgiving meal. And you can see through the experiences of her fictional characters, how meaningful this day of coming together was to her. And as she grew her influence as a magazine editor and and an author of her own right and a poetess and someone who anthologized other people's work and put them out in the world. You can see her dedication to that idea of a singular day of thanks because in the early 19th century, you would have, it seems so strange, actually, you know, when we think Thanksgiving is such a big part of America now, it seems strange to think about a time when, you know, Massachusetts might have Thanksgiving on one day and you were scared. Yeah, it might have it on another day and some places might not have it at all. And it was kind of all over the, you know, all over the map. And that just became one of her campaigns. And I say one because even though, you know, she was so influential when it came to the creation of our American National Day of Thanks, she also campaigned for women's education. Yeah, also campaigned to raise money for the widows of people lost at sea. She was always using this position that I think she felt lucky to have as someone with no education was editing on the scene to bring attention. And you know, I think if she was a literary influencer, I mean, mentioned some of the people that she published. Oh my gosh, yes, exactly. And you know, if you think about, you know, who she would be if she were around today, we would call her an influencer, right? She'd be one of the people who had a million Instagram followers. Exactly. Telling people what, but she wasn't only just trying to sell copies of her magazine, she was telling people how to take care of their kids, what kind of exercise they should have. But she was pushing all of the great male writers of that time period, you know, talk about any of them. Oh, yeah. So I mean, you know, she wanted at that time in history in the, you know, mid 19th century, it was pretty common for magazines. There were what they called scissor editors. People would clip out articles or pieces or essays from other magazines and kind of curate them and put them out in their own publication. And she, when she came on board with these ladies magazine, she was like, no, we're going to publish original, original stuff. And so, you know, one of my favorite, one of my favorite anecdotes of hers was she published a story by a very young, unknown writer that and the magazine said of this writer's work, you know, it's young and the prose is boyish and it is wanting some, you know, maturity, etc. But he shows signs of genius and is, you know, could be no less a poet than Shelly. And this is what her magazine said. And it turns out this young writer went to West Point with her son, David. So David writes his mother, Sarah Hale, and says, I showed my classmate what your magazine said about his, about his writing. And, you know, so I told Edgar, Gerrall and Poe, yes, who would kick out of West Point eventually? But yeah, who would get kicked out of West Point because he wasn't too, this was the beginning. Nobody knew who Edgar Allen Poe was. Right. Beginning of a lifelong for Poe, lifelong relationship with writer-editor relationship with Sarah Giuseppe Hale, you know, the cast of a Montiado was published. Yeah, that's amazing. I love that. It cracks me up because you just imagine these ladies, you know, reading about patterns and, you know, how to set a table and then someone getting walled up in a crib. Exactly. A little balance in your reading, you know, you just need a little balance. But she was so such a voracious reader and so interested in presenting unique ideas to the public that she recognized these things and she was willing to put them out there. And she also, in addition to supporting her five kids as a widow and running a magazine, created anthologies of women writers. I mean, yes, she was one of the first publishers of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But she also created anthologies that included people like Lydia Maria Child and, you know, Grace Greenwood and all these amazing women writers. And so, you know, influencers today, you know, might be selling a product, but she was actually in so many ways lifting up other people. And this, you know, was her passion, along with, you know, Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was her big. Yeah. So let's get back to her crusade with Thanksgiving and bring it into the Civil War. I know we want to see the wonderful 1863 proclamation. If anybody can show that. Yeah. So, so Sarah Hale decided that, you know, we had all of these different kinds of thanksgivings were proclaimed on different days and different states in different years. And she wanted Thanksgiving to be in America to be one day, the same day every year. And everybody celebrated it on the same day. So she starts writing about it in her books. She writes about it in her magazine in her like editors column. And she starts writing governors and the heads of territories and, you know, ambassadors in other countries and saying, please, can't we all get on board and do this? And then she starts writing presidents, Taylor and Fillmore and Pierce and Buchanan, asking them to proclaim, you know, a national day of thanks. And they, they just, they didn't get on board. And then in 1863, she writes, not just Abraham Lincoln, she also writes his Secretary of State, Seward, which I think is a brilliant move. And, and Seward in his autobiography, you know, says he says to Lincoln, Hey, there's another, these states complain, we're taking away their rights. There's another right we can take away from them. And Lincoln says, Well, what's that? And he says the right to proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving. And so in 1863, Lincoln answers, Sarah Giuseppe Hale's plea to proclaim a national day of thanks throughout the United States of America. And yeah, we could see that because I think I mean, there were so many wonderful documents at the archives that I was able to look at so many presidential papers. And if we can share the, do we have the proclamation? I think it's up there. Or is everybody seeing it? And we're not. Yeah, I think I think everybody's seeing it. So right. Okay. So I'm waiting for it to be shown, but I can't. Okay, but you're looking at it. Okay. My favorite part of the book too, where if you could just talk about a little get a little bit more in depth on that first that first Civil War Thanksgiving as scattered as it was, there were so many wonderful things happening in little pockets of the country. Yeah, just to share a few of your favorite, favorite anecdotes there. One of the things that was interesting to me was the way that Thanksgiving served as, you know, kind of a lens through which to examine really American culture in the evolution of the American experience throughout the 19th and 20th century and even coming into the 21st. You know, the year before Lincoln agreed to proclaim a national Thanksgiving in 1862, there was a Thanksgiving dinner where the discussion of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment took place, the creation of the of the first all black regiment in the Civil War. If anybody saw the movie Glory, that was about the Massachusetts 54th, one of the seeds that created the Massachusetts 54th, that that came to be at a Thanksgiving dinner in Boston. The year that, you know, Lincoln proclaimed this National Day of Thanksgiving. And you think about that, I was talking before about the intersection of events and people, the idea that a unifying day of saying thank you finally came to pass in the middle of one of the most, you know, divisive times ever in this country to me is so powerful and interesting. And you have people like Sojourner Truth going door to door to raise money to be able to provide a Thanksgiving meal for troops in outside Bibelwacht, outside Detroit. That's one of my favorite story. That was amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Say again. Oh, Clara Barton is there. Yeah, Clara Clara Barton's Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving celebrated in the field with soldiers writing about either things were quiet and you have Confederate soldiers writing, you know, things were quiet because our enemy was celebrating Thanksgiving. And it's it's almost like everybody kind of just took a moment. They did what you're supposed to do in Thanksgiving and they chilled out for a day. Right. Yeah. And, you know, then you have, you know, soldiers. Thomas Nast was one of the, you know, illustrator who who who did so many, so many illustrations during this period in time. And his Thanksgiving illustrations captured a lot of this stuff, you know, people celebrating Thanksgiving in the field on ships at sea, you know, and and charity started to take hold of people raising money to so that people could have a Thanksgiving meal in hospitals. And all those sorts of things during the that that first that Civil War era of Thanksgiving, when our National Day of Thanks took root and, you know, the Thanksgiving we know began and continues on to today, they're really quite, you know, inspirational when you watch people find a way to be grateful in the midst of horrific times and bringing that back to what I considered to be like the linchpin of why I wanted to do this book, The Concept of Gratitude. You know, there's a lot of research that shows that the ability to maintain a sense of thankfulness and gratefulness, when things are going their worst, is incredibly important to the resilience of the human spirit. And I think what I was trying to do throughout this book was show that resilience and how it manifested in the Civil War into the 20th century. To that point, let's talk about for a minute about the Spanish flu. I mean, how are people celebrating Thanksgiving during the Spanish flu, which, you know, is very eerily similar to what we're going through this week? Okay, so that was one of those. We were talking at the top of the top of the conversation about how books land in worlds that are very different than the world in which you conceived them. And the Spanish flu of 1918 and Thanksgiving during the Spanish flu was one of those parts when we were going through and proofreading and getting and getting ready to put this book out into the world that I just we were all just looking thinking, oh my gosh, what? So, you know, there were there were a lot of similarities. People were the flu wasn't new. People were tired of it. They were tired of quarantine. They were tired of staying away from people, you know, on the tail end of armistice day and wanting to kind of revel in the in the fact that a war was over and be able to celebrate with loved ones. People wanted to be close with one another. They wanted to get together and the advice from health professionals and civic leaders was, please don't do that. Yes, answering a lot of and say yes, stay home where it is eerily similar and you see the advice and I love going back as I know you do and looking at old newspaper articles. Oh my gosh. There's no better window into a different era than that. Yeah. Oh my gosh, seeing what was on what was on the front page, what were people focusing on what we're concerned about. And so there were all of the this is canceled. That is canceled. You know, please don't attend any large gatherings. You know, celebrate your homes, keep the spirit of the holiday, etc, etc. And there was one article I came across that's that's in the book. And it was this and it's one of the ones that for me is most memorable and it was this one family dinner and not a big family dinner either. But people who didn't live in the same house and they came together for this Thanksgiving meal. And that one meal resulted in 27 severe cases of Spanish flu. And you know, you see it and it's it's quite it's quite striking. And then there was even an article about Santa you know, the Santa appearance in Minneapolis was going to be canceled because Santa got the flu. And you know, it is really quite, I mean, you talk about history repeating itself. But I mean, it was really quite quite eerie and quite telling to go back and look at that. But again, throughout that, you know, throughout rationing for World War One and throughout the Spanish flu, you see these moments of charity and of kind of, you know, figuring out a way to be thankful for for what you have. And then, you know, we go, you know, forward into into World War Two, where, you know, Thanksgiving still wasn't a congressional holiday. It wasn't a congressionally established holiday. It was not a federal holiday until until World War Two. And I think it's just I just think it's so interesting that the the Thanksgiving we're familiar with, got it start during the Civil War, and was, you know, congressionally established during World War Two. So you see this ongoing evidence of, you know, a commitment to give thanks when things are going horribly. And that's the kind of message that even though I didn't know this book was going to land in this particular world, that's message that still feels just so incredibly relevant and poignant today. Definitely. So we have a couple of questions when it's start getting into the questions here. One of them one of them is is one I'm interested in as well because because it's such a beautifully researched book. So talk about some of the sources for your research and you and I and sort of a compound question, you and I always talk about world building and nonfiction. You know, we're not allowed to make up dialogue. We're not allowed to make up characters, not allowed to make up events. We can't combine anything we can't play with the timeline. It's a lot harder than just although fiction has its own challenges, but making things up in your mind, you know, and sometimes the dead people don't do what you want them to do. They don't tell you what you want them to tell you. They don't say what you want them to say. Yeah. So talk about your world building and your sources. People want to hear about your sources. Yeah. So, you know, world building often gets talked about a lot when we talk about science fiction and fantasy, you know, I mean, you have to really buy into Middle Earth if you're going to go on that adventure with Frodo, right? You've really got to feel Middle Earth. And, you know, I'm a Lord of the Rings, you know, nerd. So that I get that. And for nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, like you and I write, you want to feel like you're time traveling. You want to feel like you're sinking into otherwise what's the point, right? Absolutely. And that's what takes you away. And in going away to that other moment in time, you're able to not only experience a different world, but I think you're also best able to recognize the similarities of the human experience in the 21st century versus in this case, the 19th century. There were many, many resources. Thank goodness for the National Archives. The presidential papers I get into George Washington's papers, John Adams papers, John Quincy Adams papers, Jefferson's papers, the Roosevelt's papers and all of those. There were some wonderful diary entries, including non-adams during the, you know, various thanksgivings, you know, prior to, you know, Hale's crusade, you know, Thanksgiving for repeal of the stamp tax he put in his diary once, you know, and it was like that was something that would proclaim a thanksgiving for and, you know, Sam Adams proclaiming thanksgivings. Then, of course, the, you know, the proclamations, Lincoln's papers, Hale's letter. Well, let me talk about Hale for a second. We also, since you and I write about women a lot, we talk about the difficulty in writing about women because their archives, their letters, their writings were often discarded or considered unimportant. And hers were too. They were. But talking about researching her. A lot of them were luckily she was interesting because sometimes she revealed the most about herself in her, in her magazine editorials and in the introductions to her various books. And she wrote a lot of books. She was one of these people where I was looking through everything she wrote. And all I could think was my God, what have I been doing with my time? She just kept going and going and going. So, for example, she put together a wonderful anthology called The Lady's Reef, which was an anthology of American poetesses. So she brought attention to all of these wonderful American writers, American female writers. And she wrote her own biography as as the editor of this book and shared how she felt about losing her husband and shared how she felt the first time she saw a woman author, a woman as the author of a book, how she felt as a kid reading that, talked about how important her kids were to her, how important education was because even though she wasn't left with a lot of money when her husband passed away and she talks about that, she wanted more than anything to make sure that they had an education because if they did not have that they would be poor indeed. So there were a lot of really wonderful insights that came from her actual writings. Luckily, blessedly, I'm sitting here and looking at the on the floor at the floor of I have a bound copy of Goaties Ladies magazine for all of 1863. I have an actual 1863 copy. That's amazing. And you should be framing that and hanging that on your wall. That's it. And I would get up and go get it. But I'm so deathly afraid of like dripping up her green lights and everything that goes on now in this crazy world that we're in. So many of the things that she published happily have been scanned in her case by places like happy trust, which is a really old resource. But when it came to, you know, proclamation presidential proclamations and presidential letters the National Archives was incredible. One of the things that I New York, New York Public Library, manuscripts and archives division where I've done research for every single book I've ever done, had wonderful files on the US Sanitary Commission, which was a really influential organization, volunteer organization during the Civil War. Parts of those holdings are the handwritten letter by Dr. Leo, who was the first doctor to come upon Lincoln when he was shot. Oh, yeah. The handwritten, the handwritten, yeah. Yeah, Lincoln's assassination is in my book. That was incredible. And when you see, I mean, to me, like to see handwriting is such a special thing. And you know, as I do, when you start researching people for a certain amount of time, when I was working on the last castle, for example, which was my last book about Biltmore Estate and the Vanderbilt Family, I could spot Edith Vanderbilt's handwriting in a second. I mean, you look at it so much and you see the post marks and all of those wonderful things. And then I think about, I don't know, this is a whole other conversation. But I think about archives now and emails, like archiving emails, there's just there's something, it's just something missing that's, you know, right I don't I don't stationary in my in my know, I don't envy the historians coming 150 years after us, I will say that I'm dealing with you know, we need to archives. Yeah. So we have another question here. Did Sarah receive much recognition in her life? No. No, she didn't. Not that I could not that I could come across not the kind of recognition, I think, in my opinion, no, some people I'm people might differ with me. Certainly not the kind of recognition we're familiar with today where I mean basically Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving and it wasn't Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving because of this amazing woman who did X, Y and Z. It was just Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving. Right. On and on it went. And she kept writing presidents because she knew and she said this in her in her magazine, we need this to be an actual law, we need this to be a congressional established. Otherwise, it's always going to be at the whim of a president and then governors of states and heads of territories to follow suit with whatever the president proclaimed. And, you know, she never she never saw that come to pass. So she kept writing presidents right up until, you know, Rutherford B. Hayes right up until the last president who was alive, you know, at the time of her death and years later, you would see and I get into this in the book a little, you would see how the I the further away we got from 1863, you could see how the media started to remember Thanksgiving and write about Thanksgiving. And there were a couple of places that mentioned hail, but a lot of places that that didn't. So she was a very influential editor during her time. When she died, I will say this when she died. The obituaries far and wide talked about what an incredible editor she was, how influential she was. Not all of them mentioned Thanksgiving, which is kind of astounding. It's really interesting. So, you know, it was interesting to see that. I don't I don't think she cared. I really don't think she was happy that it happened. She didn't need to hear anything else about it. She was good. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. You sort of paint a lovely and I, you know, people buy the book and see the scene, but this sort of nice picture of of content you her life sort of ends just the way you wish it would end for her. Yeah, it does. It does. And I'm not going to I think it's a real I think the end of her life is quite lovely. And I guess I'm not going to say that anymore. Well, we could talk about craft where there's there is a question. Is there anything else to share about the Sojourner Truth part of the story? Anything else you could share about her contributions during that there is, you know, and there's so many, you know, I get I get into some of the contributions of of Native Americans and Black Americans during the Civil War. Frederick Douglass and his sons are in my book. They they have a, you know, they come through during the Civil War, talked about the Massachusetts 54th Harriet Tubman. Yeah, also in the story because it, you know, essentially this was a holiday that was meant to, you know, unify everyone and certainly the Civil War and the impact that the outcome of that war had on the lives of enslaved people was significant. Sojourner Truth, you know, she or one of my favorite stories, one of my favorite anecdotes was she's literally going door to door and she's 60 something at this point to raise money for a regiment of all Black soldiers that have been whacked outside of Detroit so they can have a Thanksgiving meal. And the event itself gets shared in the newspaper and she gave a speech and it's really beautiful. But she goes to this, she goes to this, she writes in her autobiography that she goes to this one man's door and she didn't always get a lovely reception when she was going door to door. And in this particular case, this man had many things to say to her, various racial epithets, various, you know, things to say about, you know, the war, et cetera. And she said, well, you know, what is your name? And he said, I am, I am the only son of my mother. And she just looked at him and said, I'm glad there are no more and walk off. Brilliant, brilliant. But then, you know, she does raise money for the troops to have a lovely, a lovely Thanksgiving where they were, you know, as good as they could. And she gave a lovely speech and it was covered in the papers. So that was that was one of my one of my favorite Sojourner Truth stories. And, you know, it's funny in these in these books because I do like to bring in, like I said, you know, I love the intersection of people. So, you know, there's Frederick Douglas and Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is a big part of this. Yeah. And and Sojourner Truth and Harry Tubman and all these folks. And and you kind of want to be able to just they're also amazing. And you want to be able to, you know, just go and go and go and talk about each one of them. There's so many rich details and you sort of seamlessly we've got many. And, you know, that's, you know, writing is so much as you know, I mean, so much of writing is not necessarily what you what you put in, but what you what you leave out. And that's the hard part. But, you know, it's what you got to do. One more craft question. And then I just I just want to ask you this because I think it's always an interesting discussion. People often ask it for me. And it's it's I have a whole long story about why I do what I do. And I'm curious about your process. Do you research and write at the same time? Or are you separation of church and state? You must research and you must write or is it sort of an integral process that you sort of go into? It's it's for me. It happens at the same. I mean, it and it shifts. So like if this is the process. Yeah. At the beginning, this much is research and this much is writing. And then as you move on, like this much is writing and this much is because what happens and I'm a big I don't know if you or people watching are familiar with mind mapping, but I'm a big mind mapper. I'm not. I will have to I have to pick your mind about this later. So it's kind of a circular way of looking at ideas. So I get these giant whiteboards and I'm not talking about like the kinds of whiteboards you could buy at, you know, an office store that might be, you know, three by four, three by five. I go to Lowe's or Home Depot and I get giant like construction size dry erase boards that take up almost my entire living room floor. And I will put a timeline across the top and then I'll put themes and characters. And then I just start drawing arrows and then you turn into John Nash. So and then you to connect people and events and things and you sort of start to see the connections that way. But I always start off with a skeletal. I always start off with an outline. The outline sometimes goes right at the window. But I do start out with one because I need to know I'm going to. I need to know there is a way to get where I want to go. But yeah, I never the thing is as you start looking into. Even after you started writing, even after a first draft or even a second draft, there are always things that kind of kind of tickle your brain and you I can't help but look into them and I'm horrible and, you know, I don't think editors love me for this. I'm always like, I got to squeeze this in. I got to squeeze this in. I got to find a place for this because you find all that makes you so good because the details are what make narrative nonfiction. So that's what makes narrative nonfiction come along. I mean, that's what makes you feel sort of like you're in a, you know, that world building thing we were talking about. But yeah, so I do a lot of outlining and but yeah, I write and research at the same time. But I definitely do. Well, even before I decide what book I'm going to do and I know you're the same way, you've got to know there's enough out there. Yeah, yeah. You've got to know the primary source materials. Yeah, you got to know there's enough source material or else you don't want to go down that road. So actually, before you've started writing the book, you've already done actually a lot of even before you propose the book to an editor, you've already done a lot of research. But so it's like the percentage kind of kind of ships. But I write in the morning. I'm a morning writer, get up, got to write before everything starts to you know, come at me and then but research is so fun. I mean, I can I can say, I, you know, I can sit in, you know, the National Archives of the Library of Congress or the, you know, New York Brown University. I mean, there's so many wonderful archives. It's like you're on a detective on the search. It's so awesome. It's so wonderful. It's such a tremendous resource that we all have. And there's just no I think of all the stuff that I've come across. I think of all the stuff that you've come across and other writers we know. And then I think of all the papers and and records that nobody's looked at yet. And it's like there's this incredible. There's just this goldmine of wonderful stories about American experience that are just. I can tell you have things percolating already for your next couple to be continued. To be continued, yes. OK, one more question that we are going to close out. But I want everybody out there to know that Denise is not only a fantastic and brilliant writer. She is also an amazing cook. What is on your table this Thanksgiving? What are you doing? OK, so Thanksgiving is a big deal in this house. Normally. Well, the day is happening. Like I am cooking. I actually have two turkeys. I went to pick them up today. We get them from a local farmer. So literally I saw these turkeys were running around. And I make stuffing. I do my stuffing and muffin tins. I make stuffing that's fancy. OK, it's not actually the whole thing about the stuffing muffin because it's not yeast. So it doesn't rise. So you can just pack muffin tins really, really high. And then so much of it, you get this wonderful crispy to moist ratio when you do stuffing muffins that way. But the better part is I'm big into Thanksgiving leftovers and stuffing muffins in the fridge. You take them out, you cut them in half, and then they are sandwich bread and you put turkey on it. And so then the stuffing muffins actually become the bread for leftover turkey sandwiches. Usually we have a big Thanksgiving leftover party here at the house on Saturday. Families that we know come by with their kids and we have all kinds of leftovers and people have dropped in and we decorate. I start the tree on Saturday after Thanksgiving. That's not happening this year. It's just... Well, you can feel free to send me leftovers in New York. I will mail you. I'll mail you jam. I will mail you jam. That's right. So I will... Yeah, I'm going to be cooking like a crazy person, but then I'm going to be eating. It's just going to be my husband and I. So goodness, I'm going to be eating Thanksgiving for like six weeks. But I have to do it. Well, everybody should buy your book. It's also a great holiday gift. Let's put that out there. Was there anything you wanted to plug your Zoomsgiving on your on your website? Oh, yes. For those of you who are doing what I'm doing, which is not traveling, you know, but connecting with people this way like we are now, I actually on my website, DeniseKiernan.com, I have a Zoomsgiving page and I have gratitude quotes and little gratitude conversation starters. And I actually have Thanksgiving inspired Zoom backgrounds if you want to have like a little seasonal. I think I need I need one of those. Yeah. Yeah. So I just I thought, let's let's let's do what we can. We'll all we'll all get through this. It'll be OK. It will be OK. That's on my site. So and I would love to hear from people, you know, via my website what they did this year because I actually do think they're going to be a lot of really interesting traditions that evolved out of need because of everything that's going on that might actually stick around the pandemic has gone. So well, I want to say thank you to the National Archives. Yes, thank you for this really enlightening and fun interview. Your book is amazing. And I'm really honored to have talked with you about it. And everybody should read it, I think. Thank you so much. Thanks, National Archives. Thanks, Abbott and happy holidays, everybody. Thank you so much. Yes, happy Thanksgiving.