Happy Thanksgiving! 16th Anniversary of this Blog, Blog Visit Report

Happy Thanksgiving! On this day, Americans are called by the United States and by each State in the Union, as they have since President George Washington first instituted the federal holiday, to give thanks to God for their blessings. The holiday was inspired by the thanksgiving meal celebrated by the English Puritan colonists in Massachusetts in the Seventeenth Century for the bounty they were able to enjoy thanks to their friendship with the Indigenous Americans, who taught them vital agricultural skills, after a period of famine. Americans thank God for their many personal blessings, both spiritual and material, as well as for their liberty and representative government. This year, we particularly can be thankful for the Constitution and its system of checks and balances, upon which we shall become reliant again in the new year. One particular blessing of liberty to be thankful for is the freedom of the printing press, which can now be exercised with technology electronically, as on this blog, which allows ordinary citizens to act as journalists and to engage in discourse in an electronic form of printing that can be published through the Internet. It was 16 years ago that I launched this blog with these goals, and over 1,500 posts later, I am grateful to be able to continue, at a time when there is a great need. Alas, the glitch that prevents indentation and line spacing continues, but I try to work around it to share important information and my perspective as a historian, former party and elected official, and public servant. But I am pleased that according to the blog host, Blogger, there continue to be thousands of visits each month to this blog from America and around the world. Thank you for visiting. Please visit regularly to stay updated.