American Holidays, A Natural History

Abstract

This dissertation examines the production and consumption of nature in middle-class American holidays. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it follows the creation of new symbols and practices associated with Easter, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In each of these holidays, members of the middle class used nature to narrate their new identity as Americans belonging less to local, regional, or ethnic communities and more to the nuclear family and the nation. In Thanksgiving, the turkey became an important symbol in the antebellum era, the same period in which the Easter rabbit was born, the Fourth of July picnic became popular, and the Christmas tree rose to prominence. These trends resulted from the middle-class desire to make the home an idealized private life complete with its own rituals and symbols that separated it from the public life of the street. While the middle class retreated into its imagined private sphere, it did so while simultaneously claiming that their families represented the core building blocks of the nation. By conflating family and nation, the middle class generated a large demand for the physical goods that made such symbolic meaning manifest--in particular, Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas trees. Reproducing these plants and animals, however, created agroecological problems, including crop diseases. While middle-class family holidays reinforce the scales of popular culture and mass agriculture, they do so only tenuously.