The United States marked the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday with traditional feasts, parades and American football, taking a moment to celebrate in a week shadowed by gun violence.
The official holiday dates to the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as a day to give thanks and seek healing. U.S. schoolchildren learn to trace the holiday to Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and celebrated the autumn harvest with the Wampanoag peoples. Among Native Americans, Thanksgiving is a day of dark reflection on the genocide that followed.
Americans were mourning this year in the wake of a pair of deadly shootings. On Saturday, an attacker opened fire in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing five people. On Tuesday, a Walmart employee gunned down six coworkers and turned the gun on himself in Chesapeake, Virginia.
