From WNYC Studios, it's Brian Lair, a daily politics podcast. It's Monday, May 30th.

Today, of course, is Memorial Day. And while I'm sure you know you get a three-day weekend,

and I'm sure you know that the real purpose of the day is to honor our nation's war dead, most Americans probably don't

know the origins of Memorial Day, and we're going to talk about that. It was a holiday in some

states before others. There's a kind of alternative Memorial Day in some places still very

controversial and offensive, and that it wasn't even called Memorial Day originally. The holiday

had a different name. So let's observe Memorial Day by learning all about this with one of America's

favorite history teachers, Kenneth C. Davis, best known as author of

the Don't Know Much About History Series, and most recently, Strong Man, the Rise of Five Dictators

and the Fall of Democracy. So thanks for joining us for Memorial Day, Ken. Welcome back to WNYC.

Hello, Brian. Always a pleasure to be with you, and I'm always reluctant to say happy Memorial Day,

but I suppose we can say happy Memorial Day weekend so everyone can enjoy it,

but it is certainly not about the weekend and the picnic and the barbecues.

Well, you certainly can't say Happy Memorial Day.

In fact, I made that mistake the very

first year I was hosting this show, and I just wish people a happy Memorial Day because the weekend was

coming up, and a listener called in and got very angry, and that listener was right, because obviously

it's not a happy kind of holiday, it's to memorialize the nation's war dead,

so I never said happy Memorial Day again. Tell everybody which war gave rise to it originally.

Well, Brian, this grew out of the ashes of the Civil War, and the caller who chastised you was absolutely correct.

It was a day that was created to memorialize and remember the men who had given their lives

in the Civil War. Specifically, the date that we mark as Memorial Day began as Decoration Day in 1868, May 30, 1868,

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