Category: Travels

In Search of a Usable Past

I have never bothered to conduct a survey, but I suspect that if you did, less than ten percent of the American population could reliably distinguish between the origins of Memorial Day and Veterans Day, rolled as they have been into one commemorative space. This is not your average American’s fault, really: maybe Memorial Day is a little more exciting, with the guaranteed three-day weekend and day off, but we have not marked them as distinct in any meaningful way for a long time now.

They are, however, quite distinct. Memorial Day is the older of the two, although it was once celebrated primarily on May 30, moving through the week like Veterans Day does. It was also reliably celebrated in only half the country until, at the very least, World War I, and in some places not until the 1990s. When it was known as Decoration Day, Memorial Day was a holiday to honor Union soldiers; states of the former Confederacy, in a rarely successful display of their commitment to states’ rights, selected different dates by state for Confederate Memorial Day. The death of Stonewall Jackson, May 10, was popular; so was the date of the Confederate surrender to William Tecumseh Sherman (April 26). Strangely, given their consummate fixation on defeat, no one selected April 9: the date of the surrender at Appomattox.

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Je Me Souviens

One of the curses of being a graduate student is that you are completely unbound from the normal tethers that anchor people to reality, like working hours and HR offices and regular, reliable wages. It is a challenge that has both professional and personal ramifications – is well documented, these days, the kinds of abuses that graduate students are vulnerable in the academy, but it is quite possible to drive yourself mad in a world without deadlines, job prospects, or any clear sense of what you’re doing most of the time. To finish in one piece, you must find your own way of handling the constant uncertainty.

I have coped with this pressure, for better or worse, by leaning into it, which gives me the (mostly false) illusion that I have some control over what I’m doing and what will happen to me when I graduate. Most recently, this led me north, all the way to our Canadian neighbors, where I spent a brief period this winter visiting Quebec City and their Winter Carnaval while working on writing a dissertation chapter.

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