Memorial Day 2022: A day to honor the fallen.

The last Monday of May is celebrated as Memorial Day in the U.S. As this day falls on 30th May, this year it will be a three-day long holiday across the U.S.

Originally called Decoration Day, Monday’s holiday honors all soldiers who died during service to the nation. 

Memorial Day was declared a national holiday through an act of Congress in 1971, and its roots date back to the Civil War era, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Unlike Veterans Day, Memorial Day honors all military members who have died in while serving in U.S. forces. 

The origins of the holiday can be traced back to local observances for soldiers with neglected gravesites during the Civil War.

The first observance of what would become Memorial Day, some historians think, took place in Charleston, S.C., at the site of a horse racing track that Confederates had turned into a prison holding Union prisoners. Blacks in the city organized a burial of deceased Union prisoners and built a fence around the site, Yale historian David Blight wrote in The New York Times in 2011.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day began as “Decoration Day,” a designated time to decorate the gravestones of many of the roughly 620,000 people killed in the Civil War.

It is unclear when and where this act of commemoration first took place: around 25 communities have been tied to the origin of Memorial Day, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, with one such event reportedly held as far back as October 1864 in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania.

New York became the first state to designate Decoration Day a legal holiday in 1873, and by 1890, every other former Union state had followed suit.

By the conclusion of World War I, the focus shifted from honoring those killed on Civil War battlefields to all men and women who had died while fighting for the United States. In the years that followed, the holiday became more widely known as Memorial Day.

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Uniform Holiday Bill, which packaged several federal holidays into the tail end of three-day weekends with the hope of stimulating travel and commerce.

As a result, Memorial Day has been celebrated on the fourth Monday of May since 1971. Unofficially, it marks the beginning of the summer season.

For many years, Memorial Day was observed to honor those who had fought and died in the Civil War — but on separate days in the Union States of the North and the Confederate States of the South. The southern states celebrated the day on May 10 or June 3.

But the huge casualties of World War 2 brought about a change of heart and everyone agreed upon a single Memorial Day for all. The day is now observed on May 30, a day that does not coincide with any specific war.

However, the occasion has evolved into public ceremonies, marked by speeches and colorful parades. It has become just another holiday, with plenty of marketing and campaigning.

Though Memorial Day was intended to commemorate those who have laid down their lives for the nation, considering how the day has lost much of its historical significance, it has been decided that Memorial Day 2022 will go beyond honoring martyrs: will honor war veterans.

War veterans include all who have served their nation. 

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