Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey.

Cooley’s quip satirizes revisionist or “history from below” approaches by pushing them to an absurd extreme: retelling Thanksgiving not from Pilgrims or Native peoples, but from the turkey’s perspective—the ultimate powerless victim of the ritual. The joke hinges on a clash between moral sympathy and historical method: expanding empathy to overlooked subjects can illuminate injustice, yet taken as a reflex it can become performative or reductive. Cooley’s line also comments on how cultural narratives are contested; Thanksgiving is both a national myth and a site of critique, and the turkey becomes a comic stand-in for those harmed by celebratory stories.