R. Mark Melville
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rmarkmel.bsky.social
R. Mark Melville
@rmarkmel.bsky.social
150 followers 310 following 250 posts
Assistant editor of Utah Historical Quarterly. Holiday enthusiast, casual trail runner, cat dad. Views are my own. 🏳️‍🌈
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rmarkmel.bsky.social
"This Land Is Their Land" (2019): Largely derivative of other scholars' work, sometimes sloppily so. 5/10.
The cover of "This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving." It features simple depictions of cornstalks.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
"Mayflower" (2006) from @penguinbooksusa.bsky.social: Not written by a professional historian, but tells the Pilgrim story, with all its triumphs and horrors, in an accessible style. 7/10.
The cover of "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War" by Nathaniel Philbrick. The image is a painting of a sailing ship and men on a smaller boat.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
"Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon" (2012) from @uwapress.uw.edu: Who would have known that a silly little vegetable has such an interesting story? 8/10.
The cover of "Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon." It is a photograph of the skin of an orange pumpkin.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
"The Turkey: An American Story" (2006) from @illinoispress.bsky.social : An environmental, culinary, economic, agricultural, and cultural history. 9/10.
The cover of "The Turkey: An American Story." It features Uncle Sam, with buckled shoes, red and white striped pants, a white beard, and a white top hat with a band with white stars. He is sitting on a pumpkin and holding a live turkey, with a document called "Thanksgiving Proclamation" next to the pumpkin.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
"Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday" (2009): This book literally changed my life, and I'm not even exaggerating. Not only did it change the way I think about Thanksgiving, it's a significant reason I now consider myself a cultural historian. 10/10.
The cover of "Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday." It features a vintage illustration of a man with a green star-spangled jacket, red and white striped pants, and a white top hat with a blue band with white stars. The man is riding on a large turkey.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
It's the time of year to geek out over my collection of Thanksgiving history books! 🤓🦃🍂 A thread.
Five books on a background of a blanket with fall leaves. The books are "Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday" by James W. Baker, "The Turkey: An American Story" by Andrew F. Smith, "Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon" by Cindy Ott, "Mayflower" by Nathaniel Philbrick, and "This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving" by David J. Silverman.
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
This comic strip from 1933 got shockingly dark.
The comic strip "Moon Mullins—In Embryo" by Willard. Panel 1: A large woman says, "Of all the stupid simple minded saps! Runnin' downstairs in front of a houseful of company in his night gown hollerin' that somethin' terrible had happened to him." A man in checkered pants responds, "Well, pet, it did give me quite a start when I looked in that mirror and didn't see myself. I'd forgot the mirror was busted." Panel 2: The woman says, "I wish to heaven there was some way of preventin' his doin' such dumb things." A man with a hat and a cigar responds, "Well, Mamie, there ain't, but one thing that I know of that coulda prevented Uncle Willie's bein' that way." Panel 3: The woman says, "What's that?" The man with the hat responds, "If somebody'd shot his father when he was five years old!"
November 10, 2025 at 4:32 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
I like to fill my Thanksgiving cornucopia with my produce-themed Beanie Baby knockoffs from 1998.
A wicker cornucopia with plush toys that look like fruits and vegetables. They have black and white eyes, purple noses, and limbs. They include corn, banana, watermelon, lemon, squash, apple, celery, green bell peppers, potato, grapes, peach, and broccoli.
November 7, 2025 at 6:51 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
Oh, Ethelinda. December 5, 1909.
A comic strip in a newspaper that says, "It's only Ethelinda—she merely drops her opera glasses." Panel 1: A woman with a 1900s hairdo, Ethelinda, is in a balcony seat with a bald man in a suit below. Panel 2: An object falls from Ethelinda while the bald man is looking down in his seat. Panel 3: Ethelinda looks down while the object shatters on the man's head, and he has jumped out of his seat with his hands in the air. Panel 4: The man looks up at the balcony while Ethelinda shrinks down in her seat.
November 6, 2025 at 3:08 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
I was amused and delighted to discover a Halloween-themed typo on Halloween. I was looking forward to learning what a "witch engine" was, but it was supposed to be "switch engine."🧙‍♀️🎃📰

(BTW, I just want to say what an amazing, fantastic resource Utah Digital Newspapers is.)
An image of a digitized newspaper with the headline "Involuntary Hoboes Held at Ogden Mistake Train for Switch Engine." A link to the article on the side says "Witch" instead of "Switch."
October 31, 2025 at 9:53 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
Replace "parties" with "holidays," and this is literally me.
The book cover of "Encyclopedia of American Holidays and National Days," edited by Len Travers. The cover has a photograph of someone holding a wrapped present, with smaller sepia images of children in front of an American flag, children in Halloween costumes, and a family celebrating Kwanzaa.
October 29, 2025 at 10:38 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
I have often wondered if this background character from "Mad Monster Party" (1967) was a BYU fan or a Yale fan.
A screenshot from the stop-motion movie "Mad Monster Party" with four unhappy people in a drugstore. The young man on the left is wearing a cap over his auburn hair. He has buck teeth and a white sweater with a blue Y on it.
October 23, 2025 at 3:21 AM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
I'm in Albuquerque for the Western History Association, and I can't get away from my nemesis, the goathead plant. 🐐
A hand holding a pulled-up specimen of puncturevine.
October 16, 2025 at 11:42 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
The Fate of Ophelia
A black-and-white screenshot of the 1960s "Addams Family" series, with Ophelia (played by Carolyn Jones) talking on an old-fashioned telephone. She has blond hair with flowers in it. A screenshot from "Wednesday" season 2. The back of Ophelia, a woman with long, blonde hair with flowers in it, faces a wall that says "Wednesday must die" written in blood.
October 4, 2025 at 12:05 AM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
For my birthday, my friend @sandypsyche.bsky.social sent me a Nancy comic book. Then separately, my colleagues gave me a birthday card with a Nancy panel! I guess my Nancy reposts, along with the Nancy and Sluggo enamel pins I used to wear on my lanyard, have given me a reputation.
The comic book "Nancy Wears Hats" by Ernie Bushmiller, next to a birthday card with signatures and a Nancy panel. The panel has Sluggo eating a cake that says "Happy Birthday" while bubbles cover his mouth. Nancy says, "I forgot to tell you I put the words on with toothpaste."
September 30, 2025 at 11:09 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
I'm looking at a school journal for incarcerated Japanese American third-graders during WWII, and I was surprised to see them say they were saving spiders for the war effort. This led me to find out, superficially, that spider silk was farmed during the war so they could use it in gunsights! 🕷️🕸️
A handwritten page that says "March 12, 1943. From Monday, March 15th, we are going to have breakfast at 7:30 o'clock A.M. because the days are getting longer. Mr. Nuttall came to our room and gave us a test. We gave him some porcupine quills which the boys had discovered this morning. There are many people ill in Topaz with mumps, pneumonia, appendicitis and colds, so we must take very good care of ourselves. We shall save rubber, money, spiders, paper, and lots of other things to help Uncle Sam. We heard that Don's sister, 2 years old Ellen Jean was lost this morning." The page is illustrated with drawings of yellow and black porcupine quills.
September 24, 2025 at 6:36 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
Reading an account of Christmas at Ellis Island in 1904, and I have a couple of thoughts:
(1) If only we still provided Christmas dinners for immigrants
(2) The women and children got treated better than the men, because who would want tobacco products for Christmas?
A paragraph from a newspaper: "On Ellis Island 2000 aliens of many nationalities were introduced to the American Santa Claus. Later in the day, when the number immigrants had swelled to 4700, they were given a Christmas dinner, with all the good things appropriate to the occasion. All the children received toys and candy, the women fruit and candy, and the men pipes and tobacco, cigars or cigarettes."
September 9, 2025 at 8:13 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
I get a lot of free books, and I wasn't looking forward to reading the memoir "A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey" by Jody Olsen. But it was an unexpected treat! The author writes in such an engaging style, almost like a novel. Both her professional life and her family life are fascinating.
The book cover for "A Million Miles: My Peace Corps Journey" by Jody Olsen. The cover has abstract art with blotches of red, blue, and salmon.
September 8, 2025 at 4:31 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
September is the best month. It's summer and fall at the same time.
A mixture of red and green maple leaves on branches with soil in the background.
September 7, 2025 at 3:22 AM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
Excuse me, I was trying to read that.
An open paperback book has a large longhair tabby cat sitting on it. The cat has a mane, long whiskers, and big eyes. The book and the cat are on a bed with a dinosaur bedspread.
August 26, 2025 at 12:23 AM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
Me: "I have thirteen years of professional experience, two humanities degrees, a shelf of books I've worked on, physical copies of the Chicago Manual of Style, a job with a century-old journal . . ."
Microsoft: "Add 'editor' to the skills section on your resume thanks to AI"
Me: 🙃🙄🤦‍♂️
An image from the sign-in page on Windows 10 with the message "Add 'editor' to the skills section on your resume thanks to AI." The computer screen has an image of wildflowers.
August 22, 2025 at 8:45 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
If I understood the tour guide correctly, this is a fourteenth-century fresco of St. Nicholas saving children from being turned into sausage. Since I mainly work in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, it's wild to see something this old! In Haddon Hall, England.
A medieval wall illustration of a man with a hooked crook and a mitre, next to a man with a monk-style haircut. There are three children in a basin.
August 4, 2025 at 7:52 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
I hope the good folks of Scotland like me better than they liked their last American visitor. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
An airplane wing with Scottish land and water below.
July 30, 2025 at 8:56 AM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
I was happy to see that Salt Lake City's "Uniquely Utah" Pioneer Day drone show last night included the city's official Pride flags.
Drones in the sky (partly blocked by a tree) assemble Salt Lake City's official Progress Pride flag. It features rainbow-colored stripes, pink and blue triangles on the side, and a sego lily in the upper left corner. Drones assemble to make a trans Pride flag, with pink, blue, and white stripes, with a sego lily in the upper left corner.
July 25, 2025 at 9:44 PM
rmarkmel.bsky.social
I talk about this in my article on the holiday (which unfortunately is not available online): R. Mark Melville, “The Twenty-Fourth of July: An Overview of Utah’s State Holiday, 1849–2022,” Latter-day Saint Historical Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 69–114.
On July 24, 1849, the residents of Great Salt Lake City awoke to the sound of a cannon firing, followed by martial music. At seven thirty, a sixty-five-foot-long “national flag” was raised, and a procession led Church leaders and spectators to the Bowery, a public open-air structure in Salt Lake City. The procession included twenty-four young men carrying copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, twenty-four young women carrying copies of the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and twenty-four older men called “Silver Greys” carrying staffs. Once everyone had assembled at the Bowery, they listened to music and speeches about the Declaration of Independence and the persecution of the Latter-day Saints, including the murder of Joseph Smith and the actions of the mobs that drove the Saints from Missouri and Illinois. Following the program, thousands of Latter-day Saints joined in a community dinner of bread, cucumbers, beets, and more. The city was also full of gold-seeking emigrants on their way to California, and hundreds of them joined the feast. Dozens of Native Americans also came to the meal. After dinner, William W. Phelps read twenty-four official toasts were read,; he was followed by Thomas Bullock reading “volunteer toasts” that were less formal than the official toastshad not been planned beforehand. The crowd heard more music and speeches before retiring to their homes. A holiday had been born. This new holiday, however, did not spring up out of nothing. In most respects, it was identical to nineteenth-century celebrations of the Fourth of July: the cannon fire, the procession (including groups of young men and young women), the political and patriotic speeches and reading of the Declaration of Independence, and the symbolic number of toasts. The Latter-day Saint settlers in what would become Utah did not celebrate the Fourth of July in 1849, and considering how some of their speeches complained about the way America had treated them, it might be easy to assume that they consciously chose July 24 instead of July 4 as a subtle affront to the United States. (When the settlers had arrived in the Salt Lake Valley two years earlier, the land still belonged to Mexico, but the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 transferred the land to the United States.) Yet the historical record is inconclusive. The Saints had not celebrated July 4 in any large manner since Joseph Smith’s 1844 murder. In fact, they consciously resented the holiday in 1845, when they were still residing in Nauvoo, Illinois—that year Lyman O. Littlefield wrote, “The people of Nauvoo have too much candor and intelligence to celebrate a thing that has no existance [sic]. . . . American liberty expired with the prophets at their martyrdom in Carthage jail.” In 1847, as Church Patriarch John Smith was making his way west, he recorded, “the 4 of July we Do not feel to celebrate it as the birthday of the Independence of the united States as we have ben Driven from her because we worship God according to his Laws.” However, that same year, members of the Mormon Battalion participated in a large celebration in California, even though it occurred on a Sunday. It is unclear whether these bitter feelings explain why they did not celebrate July 4 in 1849. According to Brigham Young, they had a practical reason: “Why do we not celebrate the 4th of July? The Declaration of Independence is just as precious to me to-day as it was 20 days ago! has it not the same validity, that it had in 1776? Is it not as good to-day as it was 20 days ago? We choose this day that we might have a little bread to set on our tables; to day we can see the bread, cucumbers, and beets, that we could not have seen 20 days ago.” Some historians believe Young was being sarcastic, as he well may have been, but his statement cannot be dismissed so easily. For one thing, Latter-day Saints in Kanesville, Iowa, including Apostle George A. Smith, observed the Fourth of July in the usual manner in 1849. Additionally, throughout the 1850s, the Mormon settlers enthusiastically celebrated the Fourth of July, in addition to the Twenty-Fourth. It appears that 1849 came right between periods of apathy (or disdain) and enthusiasm for the Fourth of July among Latter-day Saints. The legacy of the 1849 Twenty-Fourth of July meant that the pioneers had not replaced the Fourth of July; instead, they had simply created an additional independence day. Though the first pioneers set foot in the valley on July 21, they selected July 24 as the day of celebration. It is not clear why they chose this day, but there are a few possibilities. It might seem simplistic, but it is possible they selected July 24 to be a numerical counterpoint to July 4, since they celebrated the Twenty-Fourth as they would have celebrated the Fourth. July 24 was also the day that the last of the vanguard company arrived, so they might have chosen to celebrate the completion of the arrival, rather than the beginning of the arrival. And they might have selected July 24 because that was the day Brigham Young arrived.
July 24, 2025 at 11:17 PM