posted on: October 19, 2020
By the 20th century, various Union memorial traditions, celebrated on different days, merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who died while in the U.S. military service. People have been decorating graves with flowers for thousands of years.
Blight has won major historical awards, including the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize.
likely due to the 25th being mistakenly reported in several newspapers.
Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America’s national reunion. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. He is the author of many books on U.S. history, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, and an adviser for the Zinn Education Project Teach Reconstruction campaign.
War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war’s devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. A stone in a Carbondale, Ill., cemetery carries the statement that the first Decoration Day ceremony took place there on April 29, 1866. Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, When Black Lives Mattered: Why Teach Reconstruction. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight (Harvard University Press, 2002) offers a full chapter on the history of Memorial Day.
During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Nonetheless, says Blight (David W. Blight historian)Memorial Day belongs to Charleston”s freed men and Women who “by their labor, their words, their songs and their solemn parade created for themselves, and for us the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution”. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers’ reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day.
He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.” Read more here.
Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. The simple act of generosity and reconciliation was noted in Horace Greely’s New York Tribune and it inspired Frances Miles Finch’s poem, “The Blue and the Gray,” which became required memorization for generations of school children. And the truth shall set you free. This is so moving and should be taught to our young black men to assure them of our worth. Here is the publisher’s description of the book, which also helps to explain why the Memorial Day story shared in this article has been hidden from public memory: “No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America’s collective memory as the Civil War.
If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. Required fields are marked *, A collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change The dead were visible by their massive absence.
David Blight confessed in the May 26, 2012 New York Times that he has no evidence that the Charleston event led to Logan’s call for a national holiday. This is an interesting history of the 1st Decoration Day, although it seems a few commenters want to refute it.
The L.A.Times published an illustrated history about the first Decoration day in Sunday’s paper(May 24,2015) page A31, It was a whole page presentation. The lovely park sits adjacent to the Citadel, the military academy of South Carolina, and cadets can be seen jogging on the old track any day of the week.
In the U.S., Decoration Day refers to two things: the origins of our modern Memorial Day, and a current holiday that is mainly observed in the South. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. Blight is the author of “American Oracle” and many other books.
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