Memorial Day

Honor Those Lost By Working for Peace

by William Lambers

The annual remembrance of the war dead at Memorial Day is also a call to serve those who today are threatened by war and attendant hunger. 

Vietnam Veterans Transformed Memorial Day Weekend into a Holiday about Peace

by Elise Lemire

"By the time the law went into effect on Jan. 1, 1971, many returning service members decided to reject not only the commercialization of Memorial Day, but also the holiday’s traditional premise that it was noble to die fighting a war."

Baltimore Was a Key Place For Trump, If He Only Knew

by Jamie Stiehm

It's odd that Trump could give a speech about Francis Scott Key with nearly all the facts wrong; the slaveowner was a key adviser to Andrew Jackson, the model for Trump's brand of white reactionary populism.

This Memorial Day, Will We Find Meaning In Our Suffering?

Historian Drew Gilpin Faust offers her insight on mourning and redemption.

Memorial Day's controversial history explained

No one is sure how the holiday started, and people debate how it should be celebrated, but it still honors those who lost their lives in service of their country.

One of the Earliest Memorial Day Ceremonies Was Held by Freed Slaves

At the close of the Civil War, freed slaves in Charleston honored fallen Union soldiers.

A Day to Remember: Memorial Day 2019

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

For some among us, Patriotism sometimes seems just “old hat.”  Not for everybody.  

The African-American origins of Memorial Day have been suppressed.

Yale's David Blight traces the holiday to a series of commemorations that freed black Americans held in the spring of 1865, after Union soldiers, including members of the 21st United States Colored Infantry, liberated the port city of Charleston, S.C.

Why Isn’t Congress Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of Memorial Day?

by Ed Hooper

It is after all arguably our most sacred holiday.

Not Even a Trip to the Amusement Park Has Been Easy for African-Americans

by Victoria W. Wolcott

On past Memorial Day weekends blacks faced discrimination and open hostility.

On Memorial Day, What Do the Living Owe the Dead?

by Graham Allison

We owe them the courage and the wisdom to prevent the next war.

Vietnam Has Its Vietnam War. So Does Australia. So Do a Lot of Others.

by Jerry Lembcke

There’s even a group that hopes to remember “the lost cause.”

Historians Should Stop Being Embarrassed by Our Wars

by Vaughn Davis Bornet, Ph.D., Cdr (USNR, ret)

A Memorial Day plea from one historian who served.

Thousands of American military graves lie forgotten and lost abroad

We don’t know how many Americans who died while serving during wartime are buried on foreign soil.

When You Think of Memorial Day, Do You Think of Just Men?

by Kara Dixon Vuic

Women no longer have to fight to serve, but we all need to remember the costs of their service.

Lost in the Past

by Timothy Egan

Ask a high school senior what the Great War was all about and you’re likely to get a shrug or a stab based on a recent episode of “Game of Thrones.”

Remembering My Parents on Memorial Day – The Forgotten Few

by Jonathan Husband

"Had there been no World War II I would not be here to tell my story..."

Ben Alpers: A Memorial Day Thought on David M. Kennedy

Benjamin Alpers received his PhD in history from Princeton University in 1994. He joined the faculty of the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma in 1998.In today’s New York Times, retired Army Lieutenant General and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and the historian David Kennedy published an op-ed entitled “Americans and Their Military, Drifting Apart.” Eikenberry and Kennedy identify a very real problem: the increasing social distance between our increasingly high-tech, all-volunteer military and the rest of American society.   Today’s military, they argue, presents “a disurbingly novel spectacle”:

Who Invented Memorial Day?

by Jim Downs

"Contrabands at Headquarters of General Lafayette," by Mathew Brady, 1862.As Americans enjoy the holiday weekend, does anyone know how Memorial Day originated?On May 1, 1865, freed slaves gathered in Charleston, South Carolina to commemorate the death of Union soldiers and the end of the American Civil War. Three years later, General John Logan issued a special order that May 30, 1868 be observed as Decoration Day, the first Memorial Day -- a day set aside "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 church-yard in the land."

Memorial Day

Who invented Memorial Day?