|
?:reviewBody
|
-
The custom of holding observances (including the laying of flowers on burial sites) to remember and honor those who gave their lives in military service goes back many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In the United States, that custom has long since been formalized in the creation of Memorial Day (formerly known as Decoration Day), a federal holiday observed on the last Monday in May to remember the men and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. Traditionally, every year the President of the United States (or, in his absence, another high-ranking government official) visits Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day to honor all those Americans who have died in military service to their country by participating in a symbolic wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns: In a formal sense, the modern Memorial Day originated with an order issued in 1868 by Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, for the annual decoration of war graves: In a literal sense, it was not until 1971 that Memorial Day was established as a federal holiday by Congress. Regardless of when Decoration Day (or Memorial Day) may have been officially established, though, debate continues to this day regarding exactly when and where the first observance of this nature was held in the United States. In May 1966 the city of Waterloo, New York, was designated as the Birthplace of Memorial Day via a Congressional resolutions and presidential proclamation commemorating a patriotic observance held in that town one hundred years earlier: Nonetheless, dozens of other places still lay claim, based on a variety of criteria, to being the true birthplace of the modern Memorial Day, and more recent historical studies have concluded that all of those claims (including Waterloo's) are apocryphal: The multiplicity of sites that have claimed Memorial Day birthplace status for themselves are not all in the North; many contenders are Southern cities that were part of the Confederacy during the Civil War: In his book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Professor David W. Blight made the case for Charleston, South Carolina, as Memorial Day's birthplace, as that city was the site of an obscure (possibly suppressed) May 1865 event held at a racetrack turned war prison, during which freedmen properly reburied hundreds of Union dead found there and then held a ceremony to dedicate the cemetery: Although contemporaneous accounts from the Charleston Daily Courier describe and document the 1865 ceremony that took place there, and the event was one the earliest known observances similar to what we would now recognize as Memorial Day, whether it was truly the first such ceremony, and what influence (if any) it might have had on later observances, are still matters of contention. Professor Blight termed it the first Memorial Day because it predated most of the other contenders, but he noted he has no evidence that it led to General Logan’s call for a national holiday in 1868: I'm much more interested in the meaning that’s being conveyed in that incredible ritual than who's first, he said. In their 2014 book The Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday, Dr. Richard Gardiner and Daniel Bellware concluded that credit for the origins of Memorial Day should likely rest with a group of women in Columbus, Georgia known as the Ladies Memorial Association, who beginning in 1866 held an annual observance originally called Memorial Day, then subsequently referred to as Confederate Memorial Day after (as referenced above) northerners co-opted the event in 1868 and established their own Memorial Day.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}