Word: holidayers
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Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer, conjuring images of picnics, barbecues or just a lazy day off. But originally the holiday was charged with deeper meaning - and with controversy...
...exact origins of Memorial Day are disputed, with at least five towns claiming to have given birth to the holiday sometime near the end of the Civil War. Yale University historian David Blight places the first Memorial Day in April 1865, when a group of former slaves gathered at a Charleston, S.C., horse track turned Confederate prison where more than 250 Union soldiers had died. Digging up the soldiers' mass grave, they interred the bodies in individual graves, built a 100-yd. fence around them and erected an archway over the entrance bearing the words "Martyrs of the Race Course...
Despite scattered celebrations in small towns, it took three more years for the holiday to become widely observed. In a proclamation, General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic - an organization of former soldiers and sailors - dubbed May 30, 1868, Decoration Day, which was "designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion." On Decoration Day that year, General James Garfield gave a speech at Arlington National Cemetery. Afterward, 5,000 observers adorned the graves of the more than...
...outset, Memorial Day was so closely linked with the Union cause that many Southern states refused to celebrate it. They acquiesced only after World War I, when the holiday was expanded beyond honoring fallen Civil War soldiers to recognizing Americans who died fighting in all wars. It was also renamed Memorial Day. Some critics say that by making the holiday more inclusive, however, the original focus - on, as Frederick Douglass put it, the moral clash between "slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization" - has been lost. Most Southern states still recognize Confederate Memorial Day as an official holiday, and many celebrate...
With the National Holiday Act of 1971, Congress moved Memorial Day from May 30 to the last Monday in May. But critics say guaranteeing that the holiday is part of a three-day weekend promotes relaxation instead of stressing the holiday's true meaning. In 1989, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii introduced a bill to move the holiday back to the fixed date of May 30. He has reintroduced it in every Congress since then - with no success...