Memorial Day

A national moment of remembrance takes place at 3:00 p.m. local time every year on Memorial Day

The Civil War ended in the spring of 1865, and claimed more lives than any conflict in U.S. history, which required the establishment of the country’s first national cemeteries.
 
By the late 1860’s, Americans in various towns and cities had begun holding springtime tributes to these countless fallen soldiers, decorating their graves with flowers and reciting prayers.
 
On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, leader of an organization for Northern Civil War veterans, called for a nationwide day of remembrance later that month. “The 30th of May, 1868, is 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, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land,” he proclaimed.
 
The date of Decoration Day, as he called it, was chosen because it wasn’t the anniversary of any particular battle.
 
On the first Decoration Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, and 5,000 participants decorated the graves of the 20,000 Civil War soldiers buried there.
 
Many Northern states held similar commemorative events and repeated the tradition in subsequent years; by 1890 each one had made Decoration Day an official state holiday. Southern states, on the other hand, continued to honor the war dead on separate days until after World War I.
 
Decoration Day gradually came to be known as Memorial Day and originally honored only those lost while fighting in the Civil War. But during World War I the United States found itself embroiled in another major conflict, and the holiday evolved to commemorate American military personnel who died in all wars, including World War II, The Vietnam War, The Korean War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
For decades, Memorial Day continued to be observed on May 30, the date General Logan had selected for the first Decoration Day. But in 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established Memorial Day as the last Monday in May in order to create a three-day weekend for federal employees. The change went into effect in 1971. The same law also declared Memorial Day a federal holiday.
 
It is still unclear where exactly this tradition originated; numerous different communities may have independently initiated the memorial gatherings, but in 1966 the federal government declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day.
 
Waterloo celebrated its first Memorial Day on May 5, 1866, and was chosen because it hosted an annual, community-wide event, during which businesses closed and residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags.
 
Unofficially, Memorial Day  marks the beginning of summer.

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