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Tracy McKenzie, Ph.D.Arthur F. Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning; Professor of History
On Faculty since 2010
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Tracy McKenzie (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University) is a professor of history at Wheaton College, where he holds the Arthur Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning and is a recipient of the college’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Prior to coming to Wheaton, he taught for twenty-two years at the University of Washington, where he held the Donald Logan Chair in American History, served on the university’s Teaching Academy, and was a recipient of the institution’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
At the University of Washington, McKenzie’s research focused on the South during the American Civil War, and he published award-winning monographs in that field with Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Since coming to Wheaton, he has shifted his attention to helping others think “Christianly” about U. S. History. A past president of the Conference on Faith and History, he understands his vocation as that of remembering the past and reminding the church. Toward that end, he has authored The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us about Loving God and Learning from History, A Little Book for New Historians, and We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled “‘The Almighty Has His Own Purposes’: Abraham Lincoln and American Civil Religion.”
McKenzie lives in Wheaton with his wife of thirty-eight years, Robyn. Two of their grown children are Wheaton alumni: Callie (’14) and Margaret (’18).
Vanderbilt University
Ph.D., History, 1988
Vanderbilt University
M.A., History, 1984
University of Tennessee
B.A., History, 1982
- American History
- Jacksonian Democracy
- The American Civil War
- The Economy of the South
- Southern Society
- Slavery and Emancipation
- Lincoln
- The First Thanksgiving
- Christians and Historical Memory
The First Thanksgiving: The Real Story
Our American Stories
Thanksgiving is the only American holiday that has actually remained relatively innocent—it’s not something that we have been able to commercialize. But there’s something going on here more than feasting, family, and football.
Robert Tracy McKenzie is a professor of history at Wheaton College and is the author of The First Thanksgiving. He’s here to tell us the story of this quintessentially American holiday.
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Virginia’s forgotten thanksgiving story
WTOP
The pilgrims feasted with their friends in the fall of 1621. But there were at least a half dozen other thanksgiving observances that predate the pilgrims, said Tracy McKenzie, chair of the history department at Wheaton College who has studied the origins of the modern American holiday. Native Americans widely held celebrations linked to crops and the harvest. Among European settlers, Spanish colonists likely hosted thanksgiving in what today is known as Texas, and they also celebrated thanksgiving, likely a Catholic mass, in Florida in the 1560s. French Huguenots also gave thanks in Florida. And English colonists celebrated in Maine in the early 1600s, McKenzie said. But Virginians weren’t too far behind and did beat the pilgrims of Plymouth Rock fame by a few years, including an observance in 1610 and another in 1619, McKenzie said...
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Chris Thompson: Black Friday creep, Thanksgiving and a Christian ethic
Alaska Dispatch News
Thanksgiving started as a harvest celebration among the Pilgrims and the local Native Americans in the Plymouth Colony. Robert Tracy McKenzie, professor and chair of the History Department at Wheaton College and author of the wonderful book "The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us about Loving God and Learning from History," notes the key reasons pushing the Pilgrims to our shores: “In contrast, the Pilgrims’ struggle … speaks to us where we live. Their hardships in Holland were so ... ordinary. They worried about their children’s future. They feared the effects of a corrupt and permissive culture. They had a hard time making ends meet. They wondered how they would provide for themselves in old age. (Can you relate to any of their worries?) And in contrast to their success in escaping persecution, they found the cares of the world much more difficult to evade.”...
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Southern Labor and Reconstruction, A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction, 2005
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Contesting Secession: Parson Brownlow and the Rhetoric of Proslavery Unionism, 1860–1861, Civil War History, 2002
During the American Civil War there were few Southern Unionists better known in the North than Rev. William G. “Parson” Brownlow of East Tennessee. A regionally prominent figure before the war, the controversial Methodist minister and newspaper editor became ...
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Wealth and Income: The Preindustrial Structure of East Tennessee in 1860, Appalachian Journal, 1994
Recent scholarship about the 19th-century South has developed a renewed appreciation for diversity. Although not oblivious to heterogeneity, scholars writing prior to the 1980s were inclined to focus disproportionately upon the major plantation sections of the Deep South ...
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Freedmen and the Soil in the Upper South: The Reorganization of Tennessee Agriculture, 1865-1880, The Journal of Southern History, 1993
In an 1883 report to the Tennessee Legislature, State Commissioner of agriculture Joseph Buckner Killebrew addressed widespread complaints regarding the unreliability of black labor." Our labor system," he explained," as it regards the farm, may ...
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Postbellum Tenancy in Fayette County, Tennessee: Its Implications for Economic Development and Persistent Black Poverty, Agricultural History, 1987
During the last decade both economic and social historians have paid increasing attention to the postbellum South. Though with different emphases, both have concentrated heavily on the new labor arrangements that emerged in the wake of emancipation. This is as it ...
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