We won’t be bringing you an ASPPA Connect newsletter on Monday, May 31 due to the observance of Memorial Day, but we would like to share some little-known facts related to the holiday.
- Honoring those who have fallen in battle actually is a tradition thousands of years old. The ancient Greeks and Romans held annual days of remembrance for loved ones, including soldiers, decorating graves with flowers and holding festivals and feasts to honor them. And in 431 B.C., Pericles, an Athenian general and statesman, delivered public praise of the sacrifice and courage of those killed in the Peloponnesian War.
- On May 5, 1866, Waterloo, NY for the first time hosted what would be an annual, community-wide memorial in honor of fallen Union soldiers. Businesses closed and residents decorated soldiers’ graves.
- But it appears that Waterloo’s event may not have been the first such memorialization. In 1996, in the process of researching for a book on the Civil War, Yale professor of American History David Blight came upon information contained in boxes of material from Union veterans.
As the Civil War approached its end, the Confederate Army imprisoned captured Union soldiers at Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, SC. Hundreds of them died of disease and exposure there, and they were buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands.
When the Union took Charleston, emancipated people gave the Union prisoners a proper burial. And on May 1, 1865, according to The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, 10,000 people staged a parade around the track in their honor; the event include songs, military reviews and recited Bible verses.
We’ll be back on Wednesday, June 2 with the next ASPPA Connect.
- Log in to post comments