Dear friend, 

On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful for you—for your partnership, your friendship, and your commitment to our country and its foundational principles. 

There are certainly reasons to be concerned for the future. But with America’s 250th birthday season upon us, we’d be remiss not to see how much we have going for us. We are so blessed.
 

For my part, I am thankful for Jack Miller Center scholars who are building programs for undergraduates, grad students, and K-12 teachers at their universities. More than 50 of these scholar-entrepreneurs joined us for a recent summit in Utah, and the enthusiasm and energy in the room was infectious! I am thankful for the extraordinary growth of new civics schools that “are reviving universities’ civic seriousness, that is reinvigorating the humanities, inspiring students to grapple with big questions, and reversing academia’s forfeiture of its prestige,” as George Will writes in his latest Washington Post column. 

I am thankful for our extraordinary and growing staff team—incredibly hard-working, mission-driven, and creative professionals. And I am thankful for you and all of our incredible supporters throughout the country—for your generosity and encouragement in the work at hand.

 
Thanksgiving reminds us not only of what we have but of something we need more of: gratitude. As historian Wilfred McClay, a longtime board member of the Jack Miller Center, has often suggested, we don’t just need critical thinking in our country, we need appreciative thinking. 
 
Gratitude is perspective. It can fill our lives with wonder and awe, and it can motivate us with a sense of obligation to our loved ones, our neighbors, our coworkers, and our fellow citizens. 
 
This is the power of gratitude, and it is the power of history. As David McCullough said in 1995 when he received a medal from the National Book Foundation, “At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation. Everything we have, all our great institutions, hospitals, universities, libraries, cities, our laws, our music, art, poetry, our freedoms, everything exists because somebody went before us and did the hard work, provided the money, provided the belief…I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.” 
 
Thank you for investing in the teaching of our country’s history and political tradition. Thank you for partnering with us to sustain the intellectual foundations of our country. 

May you be blessed this Thanksgiving!
 
Sincerely,
 
Hans Zeiger
President, The Jack Miller Center