Welcome to the Saturday edition of The Conversation U.S.’s Daily newsletter.

Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims are inseparable in the version of American history many of us grew up with. As the story goes, the feast these separatist Puritans shared with Wampanoag attendees in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621 is the inspiration for our annual celebration.

But the Pilgrims were actually a little late to the table, as Notre Dame historian Thomas Tweed explains. There’s a longer story of thanks-giving rituals in North America – and many of the characters are missing from today’s familiar narrative.

Indigenous communities held harvest feasts long before Europeans’ arrival, for example, and Spanish Catholics in Florida celebrated Mass and shared a meal with Native Americans in 1565. Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation doesn’t mention Plymouth.

Around the turn of the 20th century, though – a time of high immigration, especially from Catholic and Jewish communities – the Protestant Pilgrims became the stars of the holiday. They also became more and more central to many Americans’ ideas about the country’s founding. It’s “a story worth telling,” Tweed writes – but not the full story.

This week we also like stories about how the notion of mail-order brides has evolved in our digital age, off-label uses of COVID-19 vaccines, and what synthetic data is – and why it’s crucial to generative artificial intelligence.

One last note: If you find our work valuable, please support us. We’re giving all our donors a free e-book of our recent series looking at bold solutions to the affordable housing crisis.