Forgetting Why We Remember
Paul Harvey
Just a brief interruption in our normal schedule for a reminder of the true origins of Memorial Day, from Charleston, South Carolina just after the Civil War. We first posted about it here four years ago. This classic David Blight short piece "Forgetting Why We Remember gets circulated by historians around this time each year, but we'll have to keep doing it until it reaches public consciousness:
The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.
Read the rest here, or you can watch Blight tell the story in a short recorded lecture snippet here.
Just a brief interruption in our normal schedule for a reminder of the true origins of Memorial Day, from Charleston, South Carolina just after the Civil War. We first posted about it here four years ago. This classic David Blight short piece "Forgetting Why We Remember gets circulated by historians around this time each year, but we'll have to keep doing it until it reaches public consciousness:
The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.
Read the rest here, or you can watch Blight tell the story in a short recorded lecture snippet here.
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