![]() Many veterans of the Vietnam War, and relatives and friends of those who fought in that conflict, make a pilgrimage over Memorial Day weekend to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., where they pay their respects to another generation of fallen soldiers. One vet says hed prefer people say, 'I hope youre having a meaningful day.' The holidays history dates to the Civil War. Each gravestone at the national cemetery is also marked by a small American flag. The May 30 date held for decades and Congress in 1968 passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, establishing Memorial Day as the final Monday in May to create a three-day weekend for federal. Memorial Day is specifically to honor those who died in military service. Nowadays, its observance includes the placing of a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, often by the president in his capacity as commander in chief. In 1971, a federal law changed the observance of the holiday to the last Monday in May and extended the honor to all combatants who died in American wars. However, Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, also claims to have held the first observance, based on an observance dating back to October 1864. Johnson proclaimed Waterloo, New York, as the “Birthplace of Memorial Day,” because it began a formal observance on May 5, 1866. The practice of strewing flowers on soldiers’ graves soon became popular throughout the reunited nation. When a women’s memorial association in Columbus, Mississippi, decorated the graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers on April 25, 1866, this act of reconciliation prompted an editorial, published by Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and a poem by Francis Miles Finch, “The Blue and the Grey,” published in the Atlantic Monthly. ![]() Songs in the Duke University Collection Historic American Sheet include hymns such as “Kneel Where Our Loves are Sleeping External,” dedicated to “The Ladies of the South Who are Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead” and “Memorial Flowers External,” dedicated “To the Memory of Our Dead Heroes.” ![]() By 1865, Mississippi, Virginia and South Carolina each had their own precedents for a Memorial Day. Southern women decorated the graves of soldiers even before the Civil War ended. ![]()
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