ADVISORY

ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan has a host of experts for Thanksgiving-related news and feature reports—from the economy and holiday shopping to the history of Thanksgiving dinners, holiday eating habits and holiday-related obesity. The University’s experts include:

Post-Thanksgiving sales and the start of Christmas shopping The University of Michigan Business School has experts on retailing and consumer sentiment and related trends.

• Aradhna Krishna, who was recently named the Winkleman Professor of Retail Marketing, can speak about trends in retailing. She can be reached at (734) 764 2322 or e-mail her at aradhna@umich.edu

• Claes Fornell is the Donald C. Cook Professor of Business Administration and director of the National Quality Research Center. His American Customer Satisfaction Index is a national economic indicator of customer evaluations of various goods and services available to U.S. consumers. Fornell can be reached at (734) 763-5937 or (734) 668-7574 or e-mail him at cfornell@umich.edu. For more on Fornell, visit: http://www.bus.umich.edu/FacultyBios/FacultyBio.asp?id=000120079

For more U-M business, consumer and retailing experts, contact Bernie DeGroat at (734) 936-1015 or (734) 647-1847 or e-mail him at bernied@umich.edu. Also this week: the 2004 forecast and consumer outlook for the U.S. economy will highlight the U-M’s 51st Economic Outlook Conference Nov. 20-21. For more, visit: http://www.bus.umich.edu/NewsRoom/ArticleDisplay.asp?news_id=1925

Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce? Richard Ford, a U-M professor of anthropology and curator of ethnology and ethnobotany at the Museum of Anthropology, is an expert on early Native American tribes and how they lived. He notes the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving dinner probably included no cranberries since there was no sugar to sweeten them and that the first Thanksgiving was not repeated annually. He argues that Native Americans had corn, beans and squash as the Europeans brought wheat, barley for beer and probably pears while the meat was wild including deer, turkey and fish. Contact Ford at (734) 764-0485 or e-mail him at riford@umich.edu. For more on Ford, visit: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/anthro/faculty_staff/ford.html

Obesity: Eating too much at the holidays and beyond • Jeff Horowitz, assistant professor of movement science in the division of kinesiology, directs the Substrate Metabolism Laboratory. He has conducted research showing the effect that even a single day of inactivity can have on a body as well as the impacts of exercise and diet and ways to improve muscle power and mobility in the elderly. He can be reached at (734) 647-1076 or e-mail him at jeffhoro@umich.edu For more on Horowitz, visit: http://www.kines.umich.edu/facstaff/horowitz.htm and http://www.kines.umich.edu/research/sml/smlindex.htm

Michigan’s first Thanksgiving, three decades before national holiday • Donald Lee Wilcox, curator of books at U-M’s Clements Library, has a wealth of knowledge on Michigan history and original material to help tell such stories. Michigan Territorial Gov. Lewis Cass declared Michigan’s first official Thanksgiving in 1829—seven years before statehood and more than 30 years before Abraham Lincoln declared it a national holiday. Cass designated Nov. 26 "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer” and called on citizens to set aside a day to acknowledge such blessing as civil and religion freedoms and a stable government and a state offering a diffusion of knowledge, education and prosperity. The original broadside editions of that proclamation, printed in the Detroit Gazette, are housed in U-M’s Clements Library. Contact Wilcox at (734) 764-2347 or e-mail him at dwilcox@umich.edu.

aradhna@umich.educfornell@umich.eduhttp://www.bus.umich.edu/FacultyBios/FacultyBio.asp?id=000120079bernied@umich.eduhttp://www.bus.umich.edu/NewsRoom/ArticleDisplay.asp?news_id=1925riford@umich.eduhttp://www.lsa.umich.edu/anthro/faculty_staff/ford.html