Thanksgiving

The Second Turning after the defeat of the Spanish Armada lasted from 1621 to 1649. Before going with King Charles I Dissolves Parliament (1629), the specific Grid item for that Second Turning was planned as The First Thanksgiving (1621). This seemed a good match for an Awakening period: The Pilgrims headed to the New World for fundamentally religious reasons, they saw their successes as the hand of Providence, and their Thanksgiving feast was a way to acknowledge God's involvement in their lives. 

English Dissenters: Just one of the topics that pops up when attempting to identify the historical context of Thanksgiving, and good luck trying to explain how any of them are related.

Although that’s all true, none of these indicators were strong enough to tie the harvest feast with the local natives to the concept of a Second Turning/Awakening. Or, perhaps it would be better to say, attempting to explain WHY these indicators DID strongly tie the events with the model kept requiring in-depth supporting documentation on disparate items like:

• What the clothes the Pilgrims wore said about them.
• The Vestments Controversy and the rise of Puritanism
• How Calvinism related to Puritanism and Separatism
• Why the Pilgrims were in the Netherlands, and why they thought it necessary to depart when they did (and why that probably does tie usefully to their Turning).
• How the Pilgrims managed to survive despite arriving too late in the season to farm effectively, while surrounded by native tribes who didn't necessarily want them there. 
• Why Tisquantum was there when they arrived, and the part he played in their successes.
• To what extent the colonists saw their situation in religious terms.

After a while, it became clear that there wasn’t a clear and concise way to assert that The First Thanksgiving was a memorable example of events in a Second Turning.  When 1629 was chosen instead, it came together much more easily.