The Pantagraph from Bloomington, Illinois • Page 62

Views War and Remembrance Memorial Day has its roots in the Civil War a time of unprecedented loss and nationwide mourning t's the unofficial start of summer (and a traditional long weekend of backyard barbecue and fun), but Jj time looking at the purpose of any of our national holidays. I would hope on Memorial Day, however, that we would take at least a little time to think about what it meant to be an American back then, undertaking those sacrifices for the common good. How can a parent or grandparent impress upon a child the significance of this day? Pick a Civil War soldier and research him online. It could be a general or a soldier, but find out what that person did and what his life involved. Make it real How will you spend Memorial Day? Well, it's the start of Harvard's Commencement Week, so it'll be a workday for me.

But what I've learned as a historian is how much the present is a product of the past, and the extraordinary actions that individuals have taken on our behalf. We are the beneficiaries of what they've done, and it behooves us to try to carry on their commitment, their belief in this nation as Lincoln described it, the "last best hope of earth" and to dedicate ourselves to the propositions that were at the heart of what those men did and died for, such as the equality of humankind and liberty. Those things are no less important today. Shared Lou A lone Union soldier is buried alongside a former foe at Appomattox Confederate Cemetery in Virginia. Memorial Day means much more, as historian and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust reminds us in her book This Republic of Suffering and the subsequent PBS documentary Death and the Civil War.

We asked her about the very first Memorial Day. Joe Kita Decoration Day, as it was originally called, was established in 1868. It grew out of the Civil War? It did. Just in the past year or so, estimates for the number of individuals killed in the Civil War have risen from 620,000 to 750,000, which is more than in all other American wars combined. In terms of the U.S.

population today, that would be 2 to 2.5 percent, or 6 to more than 7 million dead. So the tide of my book, the phrase "republic of suffering," represents the extraordinary level of loss that was both individual and national. How did Memorial Day arise? There are at least 12 towns across the nation that claim they introduced it. Warrenton, Virginia, talks about doing so as early as 1861. There's a sign in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, saying that in 1864 it started there.

And there's a marvelous story from Charleston, South Carolina, about a Memorial Day in 1865 when African-Americans honored the Union dead with celebrations and flowers. What's striking is how everybody everywhere felt the need for a moment of reflection, so I like to think of Memorial Day as being created together by a nation rather than a single town or individual You have to remember that probably half the Civil War dead were never identified because there were no dog tags or official next-of-kin notifications. It was a shared loss in the sense that so many dead belonged to everyone because they weren't identified as belonging to any single one. These were also not the kinds of deaths that society believed were appropriate at the time. They were gruesome and happened far from home.

Death without dignity imperiled the meaning of the life that preceded it, so a day for memorial was meant to restore the dignity of those lives, underscore the contributions that had been made, and in some way ratify how important the courage and sacrifice had been. It was an important part of the nation's mourning. Have Americans today lost the "memorial" in Memorial Day? I'm not sure we spend enough LnrrtiiM sum run To read an excerpt from Faust's This Republic of Suffering, go to parade.com memorial MAY 26, 2013.