Introduction: Days Off 

Holidays by definition are times out of time, when the familiar rhythms and practices of everyday life are temporarily suspended and replaced, often dramatically, by other possibilities, experiences, and sensations. Holidays of all sorts (official and unofficial, spontaneous and planned, secular and religious) are "days off" from the disciplines and demands of work, the usual relations among family members and friends, the familiar geography and ecology of everyday life, and even from what regularly passes as a person's normal self.

The variety of American holidays, from Memorial Day solemnities to the green-dyed hilarities of Saint Patrick's Day, have generally been interpreted as events of cohesion and integration. The great celebrations of civic life are viewed as the sacred liturgies of the nation's civil religion, while the festivals of immigrants are presented both as the way that the uprooted preserved and passed on their cultural traditions to their children and, at the same time, that both generations were connected (or connected themselves) to the national narrative. In a diverse, pluralistic society, according to these arguments, holidays and holy days have maintained the integrity of the different peoples of the United States as they have brought them together into one nation and a common civic culture.

But as countless reform-minded citizens have pointed out over the years, men and women do not behave on holidays the way they should (and normally do). Public festivals derive their peculiar energies from the tensions and conflicts between generations, classes, and cultures that surface in the absence of the restraints of routine. Popular rage and frustration with the discrepancies between the world as it is said to be and the world as it is experienced at work and at home have frequently erupted during civic and religious festivals. Furthermore, the institution of each major American public holiday was attended by social dissension--the controversies over whether or not to create a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., are only the most recent example--adding to their complexities. The suspension of the ordinary makes holidays potentially very dangerous times.

From Calendar to Covenant 

The men and women who risked the North Atlantic crossing in the mid seventeenth century to establish a pure church in a godly society on New England's shores had left behind them a world in which the passage of time was measured by holy days and saints' feasts, many of which had pre-Christian roots and were linked to the cycles of the agricultural year. The Puritans rejected this calendar and this way of being in time. They celebrated none of the old "popish" holidays, not even Christmas and Easter, both of which went scrupulously, almost ostentatiously, unobserved in New England. These were days like all others, which meant that God's will could be best served on them not by resting and merriment but by sharing the tasks of building the new world together in the wilderness.

New England's days-out-of-time reflected the Puritans' foundational commitment to the godly labor of the covenant. The special relevance of the word of God for New England was explicated by the clergy each week on the Sabbath, a day set aside by piety and law. Fast days were called by ministers and magistrates in response to troubles like war, epidemics, and internecine conflict that imperiled the very survival of the community and seemed to indicate divine displeasure; days of thanksgiving were proclaimed when God granted the covenanting people a reprieve. All work stopped on these days as the people gathered in their meetinghouses to fortify the bonds of the threatened covenant.

But the "grandest spectacles" of Puritan New England were public executions. The Puritans put to death murderers, adulterers, religious dissenters, witches, men accused of consorting with animals, and pirates in hugely attended public rituals. The "criminals" on the gallows (some of whom were hapless men and women snared in webs of godly suspicion and pettiness) had endangered the success of the New England way by their transgressions, and this demanded reparation and revenge before the eyes of the community. Tension mounted as the crowds strained to see if the condemned would repent. If he or she did, in a reenactment of every Puritan's inner passage from terror to something like assurance, then the assembled saints enjoyed the satisfactions of having their cosmology sanctioned by the scaffold, and printers did a brisk business in subsequent weeks hawking the spiritual capitulations of the doomed. But if the man or woman under the rope refused to play the part assigned, as some hardy and indignant souls did, then the crowds left troubled and uneasy, their world shaken a little by this unexpected and vexatious gallows obduracy.

A People Free and Enlightened 

The first American secular holidays took shape amid deepening tensions with England in the 1750s and 1760s, when the dangerous hilarities of medieval and Elizabethan festival traditions fused with the intensity of colonial republican ideology to constitute brilliant and powerful public political theater. The Stamp Act, for example, passed by Parliament in 1765, unleashed a yearlong series of demonstrations. One of the first, in Boston, was organized with the assistance of the men responsible for the annual excitements of Guy Fawkes (or Pope's) Day. Realistic-looking effigies of stamp distributors were paraded in carts and then desecrated by crowds throughout the colonies; in subsequent years, patriots met together to commemorate this moment of resistance in further celebrations. In this way, by means of provocatively worded toasts, hanged effigies, public choral singing, and fireworks, the colonists celebrated themselves into revolution.

These political excitements were recalled but vastly outdone by the huge and brilliantly choreographed national parties that attended first the events of the war's end and then the ratification of the Constitution and Washington's inauguration in 1789. The festivities centered largely on Washington himself, whose two long journeys, homeward from the battlefields and later to New York and the presidency, became occasions for the outpouring of national sentiment (although some Americans protested what they saw as a monarchical or even "popish" quality to the proceedings).

The people were not so much celebrating their enthusiasm for the nation in these festivities as they were constituting it--"observing themselves," as Kenneth Silverman has written, "in the process of defining themselves." Men of diverse occupations and ranks marched side by side in ratification parades, carrying the tools of their trades (and sometimes stopping to demonstrate their skills to the crowds), with their feet making the case for civic republicanism.

Surprising Conversions 

Washington's epochal journeys were anticipated almost half a century earlier by another itinerancy that generated almost as much excitement and enthusiasm. Evangelist George Whitefield's ride through the colonies on his second visit from England in 1739-1741 fanned the flames of a religious revival that had been flickering in New England and the Delaware Valley since the 1720s. The grandchildren of the founding generations, living in a more heterogeneous and fragmented society, were forced to find new idioms for religious experience and new sources of consolation; their response was protracted public gatherings in which neighbors moved from anxiety to reassurance--if not quite together, then at least side by side and within sight of each other. Revival meetings in this way resembled the earlier generations' public trials and executions, only now the mourners' bench replaced the scaffold as the site of the drama of conversion.

Revivals became one of the central instruments of American popular religion, shaping Protestant experience, identity, and participation, particularly in periods of internal migration. A second awakening, beginning at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801 (where more than fifteen thousand people assembled for six days of religious excitement) accompanied the expansion of the westward frontier; later in the century, eastern and midwestern evangelists organized similar gatherings in Texas and the Southwest.

Long and uproarious revival meetings, held outdoors under the trees either in the summer or at the end of the harvest season in the early fall, drew isolated farm and ranch families from miles around, offering them some sacred, and many more profane, encounters. Revivals were the early nation's most popular regional gatherings and the ancestors both of the state fairs of the late nineteenth century and of tourist attractions, like the Memphis Cotton Carnival and West Fargo, North Dakota's Pioneer Review Days, concocted by ingenious local boosters in the twentieth.

Outdoor religious meetings were also among the few occasions that African American slaves could come together apart from work and away from the scrutiny of their overseers. Initially ignored by white Protestants (and even forbidden conversion by their masters), slaves were swept up in the enthusiasms of the Great Awakenings. At camp meetings, which were segregated by race (and gender), slaves congregated behind the preacher's stand; but African Americans from different plantations often stole away at night to meet in hidden "hush harbors" where they forged a unique and powerful synthesis of revival Christianity and African religious sensibilities.

Storm-Tossed Celebrations 

As the rift between the North and the South widened in the 1830s and 1840s, civic holidays which only a generation earlier had served as engines of national identity become spectacles of fear and regional hostility and mistrust. One of Georgia's representatives, Wiley Thompson, rose during the bitter and protracted congressional debate over how to celebrate the centenary of Washington's birth in 1832 to warn that the removal of the first president's remains to the capital would mean that in the event of secession, the great Virginian would repose "on a shore foreign to his native soil." Southern Fourth of July oratory in these years progressed inexorably from fulsome evocations of the national spirit to darkening predictions of conflict and heated apologiae for slavery, and finally to calls for secession, while in the North abolitionists turned the day into a forum for attacks on the peculiar institution. Not surprisingly, the popularity of this American holiday reached its nadir in the decade before the war.

Regional loyalties have always been important in determining the American calendar. For much of the nineteenth century, folks outside of New England resisted the celebration of a national thanksgiving, scorning it as a "Yankee" holiday and preferring instead locally rooted harvest home festivals. There are competing northern and southern versions of the origins of Memorial Day, and southern states continue to commemorate the heroes and events of the Confederacy. Indeed, there is, properly speaking, no truly "national" holiday in the United States, since congressional jurisdiction over the calendar is limited to the District of Columbia and federal employees, with each state retaining authority for its own cycle of holidays.

The Country and the City 

In the years after the Civil War, millions of Americans, black and white, moved from farms and small towns to cities and factories, a vast internal migration with profound and lasting consequences for the texture of everyday life. People who were raised amid the smells, sounds, and rhythms of the countryside found themselves in the harsh, confusing, and competitive environment of the industrial city during the brutal heyday of American capitalism. The era's public gatherings and celebrations took shape in this break between worlds, as men and women struggled to keep body and soul together in daunting material circumstances. Dwight L. Moody's revivals at the end of the nineteenth century and Billy Sunday's in the early twentieth offered transplanted country folk the opportunity to reencounter the religious world of their childhoods until the summers, when they could make pilgrimages back to the old places for homecomings, family reunions, and church picnics. African American migrants came together in intimate Pentecostal congregations in small spaces just off the cold streets of northern cities, the urban equivalents of the hush harbors, where they could share powerful currents of feeling with people they greeted in the language of kinship.

The peculiar strains of this period on the transplanted urban middle classes, among whom desire and denial colluded to shape a culture of sentimentality, gave rise to a new holiday. In 1907, Anna Jarvis, a West Virginian who had migrated to Philadelphia, was moved by her mother's death back home two years earlier to begin a national campaign to celebrate the image of the old-fashioned mother. This appeal to nostalgia and innocence proved widely compelling at a time when many American mothers were staring for ten hours a day, in poorly ventilated and badly lit factories, at the pulsing needles of sewing machines or grinding through mounds of piecework at home, and others were seeking broader roles for themselves in public life. By 1912, Mother's Day was observed in every state. But the ultimate fate of sentimentality is cynicism, and the times quickly overwhelmed Jarvis's vision. She had wanted the day marked by church services, home-cooked meals, and small tokens of filial piety; by 1961, $875 million was being spent on the holiday, which had become a showcase for the powers of the advertising industry. Jarvis had disappeared from public awareness long before this; deeply disappointed by what had happened and defeated in her strenuous efforts to prevent it, she died alone and destitute.

More realistically, American workers managed to claim some time off for themselves (and their mothers) in the long stretch between the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. The socialist New York Central Labor Union organized a parade and picnic in September 1882 to raise funds for a labor newspaper. More than ten thousand workers came out to march around Union Square and then up Fifth Avenue to Forty-second Street in a declaration of the power of unions. Labor Day was a legal holiday in all states but one by 1928.

Holidays of the Huddled Masses 

Immigrant celebrations also took place between worlds. Men and women from southern and eastern Europe, Ireland, Mexico, and Asia brought the calendars of their homelands with them to these shores and continued to keep the special times of the old worlds, as much as the changed circumstances of their new lives and work would allow--and sometimes even when they would not. The premodern European calendar of holy days reappeared as the American Catholic population steadily increased during the nineteenth century, and Jewish immigrants brought an even more ancient cycle of days to the industrial city. In the familiar rituals of the Sabbath or a saint's feast day, immigrants could experience another kind of time than the regimented and closely monitored minutes of their workplaces.

The nation's cities, which seemed bizarre enough in these years to longer-established residents, became even more foreign and strange on important days in other calendars. Chinese immigrants in San Francisco and New York danced dragons in the streets to celebrate the start of their new year, and Jews threw breadcrumbs representing their sins into rivers shining with industrial effluvium on the first day of their year. In adjoining neighborhoods, Italian (or Portuguese, Puerto Rican, or Mexican) Catholics carried the statues of saints who had protected their crops, fishing boats, and villages in their home countries out into city traffic, dollar bills fluttering on their brocaded gowns.

All of this was a nightmare to the descendants of the Puritans, an almost unbelievable return of the repressed, and they fought back in kind. An organization grimly called the National Security League began promoting Constitution Day (17 September) in 1914 as a way of Americanizing immigrants, and the tricentennial of Forefathers' Day was celebrated in 1920 with particular enthusiasm. The old civic holidays were charged with a new agenda: in 1915, for example, the commissioner of immigration at the port of New York, Frederick Howe, asked that the Fourth of July be celebrated as Americanization Day.

These efforts to diminish the threat of the immigrants' otherness were welcomed by the ethnic middle classes, eager to find some connection to the society around them. Neighborhood doctors, lawyers, funeral directors, and high school teachers promoted holidays in honor of Pulaski, von Steuben, and Columbus as declarations of their own pride and achievement. The immigrant working classes could not always recognize themselves in these grandiloquent re-creations of what they were told was their history and culture--southern Italian immigrants, for example, knew more about the tax policies than the glories of Rome--so tensions over the right way to celebrate the tradition often erupted between classes within ethnic communities. The ethnic clergy often encouraged these middle-class "reforms" as a way of asserting church power over unruly popular devotions.

Ethnic holidays were not carried across the ocean like baggage. Instead, they became the occasion in this country for a troubled and anxious engagement with the difficult challenges of migration and for the enactment and experience of competing versions of the past and present between classes, men and women, insiders and outsiders, and generations. American-born children often found themselves forced to participate in these events by their parents and grandparents, who sought to secure through the discipline of family and community gatherings the younger generation's submission to an ethos it could not possibly share. Especially fierce hostilities centered on the daughters of immigrants, who during festivals risked what was ordinarily forbidden them--going out or talking to boys--which is why so many second-generation romances were begun on these days.

Festivals of Collective Obscenity 

Between January and May 1919, five black men were burned alive in separate incidents in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas, before large and excited crowds. The lynching of African Americans and the desecration of their bodies became one of the central public spectacles of the South in this ugly year.

Lynch mob leaders used the language of holiday entertainments to describe the tortures they intended for the bodies of their victims; and when the crowds, which included men, women, and children of all social classes, had been sufficiently excited and amused by these promises, they torched the pyres. The noise of the flames competed with the crowds' roars of approval and shotguns fired in celebration. Afterward souvenir sellers picked through the smoking ashes for prizes, the most coveted of which were bits of rope and pieces of the victims' charred bodies.

Although these grim "holidays"--"festivals of collective obscenity" in Max Gluckman's phrase (quoted in Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society)--were rooted in the pathologies of racism and the social organization of southern society in the early years of the twentieth century, they also recall the public executions of Puritan New England and the later colonial desecration of effigies, and in this way raise the broader issue of violence and American public celebrations. The Fourth of July has been a particularly gory feast: in 1908, to take just one year's statistics, more than six thousand people were killed or wounded during the "annual orgy of fire" (in the words of the National Fire Protection Association).

Each occasion of festival violence must be examined separately because these rituals of destruction and brutality, like other kinds of human performance, take on resonance and meaning in specific social and historical circumstances. The crowds scanning the faces of the condemned or rooting through the ashes of rope and flesh seem literally to have been looking for something, practicing a nervous divination. The social worlds around the scaffolds were under pressure from hidden forces when these carnivals of desecration became an important feature of local popular culture; men and women could feel in their everyday experiences that what they called reality was cracking, and violence may have been the effort to articulate the old order of domination and seal it with the fixative of the blood of outsiders. The desecrated body of the victim represented, through ritual inversion, the fantasy of the social order restored.

But arguments like these, which are useful up to a point, ignore an essential feature of holiday violence: it was a source of pleasure, amusement, and satisfaction for many people. Fourth of July revelers went looking for bloodshed and took pleasure in the risk of gunpowder and brawls; in the more carefully sublimated domestic world of the middle classes, these thrills were found in antiquarian reconstructions of Wild West shoot-outs, Indian massacres, and Civil War battles that have been popular regional tourist attractions since the nineteenth century. The old paradigm of sacred liturgies and ritual integration was clearly off: holidays of all sorts have more often permitted men and women to experience the delights of violence as they performed their rage in the streets.

"Harlem is also a Parade Ground" 

African Americans who migrated to the great black metropolis of the North found there a heterogeneous community of varied African American and African Caribbean classes, cultures, religious faiths, and political aspirations. But Harlem's many different peoples shared its streets in common, and these served as the theater of the community's richness and complexity, where people went to observe and be observed.

Harlem took its protests into the streets. In the summer of 1917, eight thousand Harlemites marched down Fifth Avenue in complete silence to the sounds of muffled drums to express their outrage and sorrow over the July massacres in East Saint Louis; in later summers, street protests against racism, police brutality, and economic exploitation took more violent forms. Harlem also took pride into the streets. On 17 February 1919 the 369th Infantry, Harlem's Hellfighters, which had fought with distinction under the French flag, returned in a glorious parade up Fifth Avenue to Harlem. And Harlem took its different and competing hopes into the streets: Marcus Garvey's followers paraded up Seventh Avenue in dress uniform in the early 1920s, and in the 1930s Father Divine's white-robed angels carried placards in processions to proclaim God resident in the community. On Sunday mornings, as James Baldwin remembers them in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Christian men and women walked proudly past the shipwrecked survivors of Saturday night, making clear that there was another way to live than this. The young Baldwin knew, though, that Saturday night in Harlem (and around the country) had pleasures undreamed of (or denied) by Sunday folk, most of them on display, along Seventh Avenue.

The Movement for a Safe and Sane Fourth 

The Fourth of July has always been a troubled holiday, if not for the dullness of its soporific oratory (which was already the butt of national ridicule by the 1830s) then for the intensity of its excitements, noise, and smoke. But in 1903 the Journal of the American Medical Association began publishing casualty counts for the day, and as these rose, so did national revulsion with the holiday. The Progressives set out to improve it.

The campaign for a "Safe and Sane Fourth" was initiated in 1909 by the Playground Association of America at its annual meeting in Pittsburgh. The enterprise was widely supported by fire and police departments (which began refusing permits for the sale of fireworks) and by medical doctors, who each year had to attend the horribly painful deaths of scores of adults and children from an affliction called "patriotic tetanus" or "Fourth of July tetanus," which developed in the infected wounds inflicted by fireworks. Reformers proposed in place of this annual patriotic firefight a "New Fourth," observed with civic pagents, alcohol-free picnics, and the revival of edifying oratory. In a widely reported and highly regarded model celebration at Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1908, people of Swedish, English, Scottish, Irish, Greek, Italian, French, Chinese, Armenian, Syrian, Polish, and African American heritage marched in a parade of nations led by Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West troupe.

But the motives of the reformers were not unmixed. They wanted the Fourth of July to be safer, more restful, and family-centered, but above all they wanted it to be quiet. Holidays articulate their discordant messages in many voices; in the case of the Fourth, the explosion of firecrackers eloquently tossed over the high fences surrounding the homes of factory owners delivered a clear enough greeting. As Roy Rosenzweig shows in his discussion of the holiday in Worcester, Massachusetts, at the turn of the century, the town's elite had become disturbed not only by the noise and violence of working-class festivities but also by their unmistakable political content. In the days of labor struggles the Fourth of July was threatening to become the nation's annual charivari, and when reformers called for a "safe" Fourth they meant safe for themselves as well as for other people's children.

"Sane" refers to something else. One of the sponsors of the campaign, Mrs. Isaac L. Rice, encouraged "those of us who know what the day means" to "endeavor to make it both memorable and illuminating to those who do not," by which she meant the children of "the poor and ignorant, of the distressed and disheartened alien within our gates" (quoted in Cohn, "Popular Culture and Social History," p. 177). A version of America's past and present, free of class struggle, racial hatreds, and regional hostilities, had to be constructed for these new Americans, although Mrs. Rice was not confident they would understand.

From Covenant to Consumption: Movable Sales 

The United States had become an ambivalently, often anxiously, modern society by the third decade of the twentieth century, increasingly dedicated to an ethic of consumption that many feared was subverting the nation's traditional religious and cultural values. The story of American holidays in the twentieth century both reflects this development and serves as a counterpoint to it, because as everything solid was melting into air, some Americans used their days out of time to celebrate and test the possibilities of the new, others to exploit them, and still others to resist what they saw as the end of a Christian society.

The signs of a new national ethos were evident by the 1920s. Church activities which had once absorbed so much American time were competing, less and less successfully, with new and tantalizing secular opportunities for leisure such as movies and baseball, and the lure of Sunday outings in the family automobile seemed to spell the end of the traditional American Sabbath. Even the faithful who stayed behind could not help comparing their minister's all-too-familiar voice and well-worn morality with the mellifluous blandishments of radio preachers, peddlers, and crooners.

As Anna Jarvis discovered to her dismay, commercialism had come to dominate the seasonal round of American calendrical holidays. Beginning in the early 1920s, huge Thanksgiving Day parades sponsored by department stores like Macy's in New York and Hudson's in Detroit, consolidating their victories over smaller competitors, ushered in the frenzied Christmas retail season. The new advertising industry, wielding techniques of mass motivation perfected during the propaganda campaigns of World War I, transformed even relatively minor holidays like Valentine's Day into feasts of sales for the retailers of gifts and tokens.

Gradually, over the middle years of the century, consumption, and not commemoration or recollection, became the point of most American holidays. Patriotic pageantry diminished and civic parades were shortened or canceled as Americans took to the beaches, amusement parks, and, more recently, the malls rather than to their village greens, on their days off, a shift in holiday observance that reflects a broader trend in these years away from the public sphere and toward more private and domestic concerns and interests. Increasingly people wanted to spend their holidays in their own backyards, where they could watch holiday pageants or ball games on television; and the topography of the suburbs, which had no central meeting spaces other than stores, built this reorientation of the common life into the landscape.

Citizenship was being redefined as life-style; excitement and enthusiasm drained from the public square. The ebullient and hilarious partisanship that had once characterized the nominating conventions of the two major political parties and their subsequent campaigns were associated now with mass-marketed sporting events like the Super Bowl. And as the public meaning of holidays waned, the connection between specific dates and events in the nation's past (Lincoln's birthday, for example) and the holidays marking them was severed. Holidays are now routinely moved from their traditional locations on the calendar and reaffixed to convenient weekends to facilitate retail sales and private leisure activities, making all American civic celebrations into movable feasts.

Although these developments have permanently altered the character of American holidays, they did not proceed at the same pace around the country or go unchallenged. Several traditional holidays of the white South, like the birthday of Robert E. Lee and Confederate Memorial Day, retained strong historical and regional meanings. The African American festival Kwanzaa, which runs from 26 December to 1 January, was established in 1966 in part to provide black families with an opportunity to exchange gifts, enjoy family gatherings, celebrate their African heritage, and reaffirm community values in a less commercial atmosphere than that associated with Christmas. Ceremonies honoring local veterans, especially those who fought in the Vietnam War, became important events in small towns around the country during the 1980s, and there are signs that the patriotic Fourth has enjoyed a revival.

'Tis the Season ...  

Fierce public debates have erupted in the past several years over the place of Christmas in a secular and pluralistic society dedicated to the separation of church and state. That government offices and many schools and businesses are closed for two Christian holy days, Christmas and Good Friday, seems to be generally tolerable; but battle lines have been drawn over the issue of placing Christian holiday symbols in government spaces like post office lobbies or the corridors of city hall. Indeed, the appearance of civil liberties lawyers in court to argue against such displays has become almost as regular a feature of the American Yuletide as the descent of Santa Claus into shopping malls.

Some people have argued that the Christmas tree is a folkloric symbol drained of specific religious content that has become the common property of all Americans; others have attempted to balance Christian imagery in government spaces with holiday icons of other faiths, a gambit known as the "menorah defense"; a minority have defended the display of Christian symbols on the grounds that the United States is in ideals and history a Christian nation, however religiously diverse it has become. But civil libertarians and the nation's courts have found these arguments unpersuasive, and many religious citizens consider the arguments reductive of the integrity of their traditions. The debate over the appropriate place of religious imagery in a secular, tolerant society continues, however, making Christmas into an ongoing examination--and, obliquely, a celebration--of the First Amendment.

American diversity has more recently led to the reimaging of another popular holiday. Halloween was originally intended as a mockery of the pieties and spiritual comforts of the two days following it in the Christian calendar, All Saints (November 1) and the Day of the Dead, All Souls (November 2). In the United States it has always been mainly a children's festival, with only the faintest trace of the night's subversive possibilities lingering in its macabre costumes and in the rougher pranks of older children.

As Americans cut their ties to the public sphere and cities became more dangerous places, this holiday waned; parents were warned to inspect the candy their children had collected trick-or-treating for harmful objects inserted by unknown people out there in the empty and so threatening public square, and children were encouraged to limit their rounds to family and friends. But while the children's holiday shrank, another more adult and playfully subversive celebration appeared in its place. Halloween had already had an underground appeal as being one occasion when gay men and lesbians could publicly express and explore at costume parties the identities they otherwise had to guard. In the 1970s and 1980s, as gay and lesbian political activists pressed for recognition of their civil liberties and political rights, Halloween costume parades in New York and San Francisco became public celebrations of the nuances of gay identity and pride; more recently, the darker idioms available on Halloween have offered a way of expressing grief and mourning for friends and family lost to AIDS.

Recapitulations 

The public spectacles of the 1950s and 1960s, some of which appeared strange and radical at the time, recalled many of the themes and traditions of earlier American festivals. The prurient fascination with the Rosenbergs' last moments, including the grisly details of Ethel Rosenberg's prolonged agony, offered an anxious nation the familiar satisfactions of revenging the betrayed covenant. The televised rituals of grief during the days after John F. Kennedy's assassination resembled the spontaneous outpourings of national sorrow at the deaths of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Even the bitter polarization of holidays like Memorial Day and Veterans Day during the Vietnam War was not new, as the history of the Fourth of July shows. The ritual-makers of the 1960s took these varied traditions and reassembled them into powerful and evocative forms; the improvisation of public rituals--sit-ins, teach-ins, "summers of love," and people's parks--became one of the decade's most accomplished arts. The greatest improvisations rose out of moral and political passions. The weary feet and rested souls of civil rights marchers, the angry demonstrations and riots in northern ghettos, and the street rallies of the Nation of Islam contributed to the beginnings of the remapping of relations between black and white, while the anti-Vietnam moratoriums and demonstrations helped end a war and a presidency.

What was truly new in this period was the technology of communications. The chant of protesters that "the whole world is watching" signaled a new age of public ritual. Millions looked on while cities burned and children ran from police dogs; now hundreds of millions watch football games and revolutions. Public spectacles have been transformed into global events.

Conclusions 

Holidays exist in counterpoint to the world of work. The temporal rhythms of work, the impact of particular jobs on the postures of the body, and the psychological demands of different workplaces are fundamentally constitutive of the worlds of holidays, from harvesttime revivals to the sit-ins that freed students from exams. This is why such occasions seem endless, and why some people try to extend the oblivion with alcohol and drugs while others fling their bodies into unaccustomed excitements.

These liberated laborers then go to work on their worlds. The rituals and practices of holidays do not reflect or legitimize social practices and cultural styles; they create them. Worlds are made and unmade during holidays, and because the power of these days is so elemental, sex and violence in complex patterns of creation and destruction are inevitably a fundamental part of them.

Furthermore, holidays create and "decreate" worlds with many different tools, the least important of which, despite what all those sorry hours of oratory might suggest, are words. Protests, parades, homecomings, and saints' feasts are marked by particular smells, sounds, tastes, and textures. The power of these days works deeply in people, at the level of their senses, beneath their awareness: Americans abroad scour souks for cranberry sauce that they will not eat on Thanksgiving, and patriotism in the United States will always smell of the library paste that public school students used to make their collages of cherry trees, log cabins, and Pilgrims.

Finally, "public" does not adequately demarcate the terrain of such days and experiences. Revival meetings and ethnic festivals, for example, derive their power from the interplay between what happens in the tent and street and what happens at home. It is impossible to draw a clear line between public and private at such events; instead, they work their power in the interplay between the two spaces, just as they do between past and present, meaning and hope, desire and denial.

General Works

Anderson, Jervis. This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950 (1981).

Burning at Stake in the United States: A Record of the Public Burning by Mobs of Five Men, During the First Five Months of 1919, in the States of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas. (1919; repr. 1986).

Cohen, Hennig, and Tristram Potter Coffin, eds. The Folklore of American Holidays (1987).

Deems, Edward M., comp. Holy-Days and Holidays (1902).

Dolan, Jay P. The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (1985).

Douglas, George William. The American Book of Days (1937).

Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987).

Glassberg, David. American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (1990).

Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan (1930).

Lincoln, Bruce. Discourse and the Construction of Society, (1989).

Linenthal, Edward Tabor. Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991).

Shermanski, Frances. A Guide to Fairs and Festivals in the United States (1984).

Silverman, Kenneth. A Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976).

Smith, Sheldon. "The Re-establishment of Community: The Emerging Festival System of the American West." Journal of American Culture 8, no. 3 (1985).

Warner, William Lloyd. American Life: Dream and Reality (1953).

Zelinsky, Wilbur. Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (1988).

Civic Holidays

Albanese, Catherine. "Requiem for Memorial Day: Dissent in the Redeemer Nation." American Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1974).

Cohn, William H. "A National Celebration: The Fourth of July in American History." Cultures 3, no. 1 (1976).

Cohn, William H. "Popular Culture and Social History." Journal of Popular Culture 11, no. 1 (1977).

Huff, A. V. "The Eagle and the Vulture: Changing Attitudes Towards Nationalism in Fourth of July Orations Delivered in Charleston, 1778-1860." South Atlantic Quarterly 73, no. 1 (1974).

Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (1983).

Smilor, Raymond W. "Creating a National Festival: The Campaign for a Safe and Sane Fourth, 1903-1916." Journal of American Culture 2 (1980).

Watts, Theodore F. The First Labor Day Parade, Tuesday, September 5, 1882: Media Mirrors to Labor's Icons (1983).

Religious Celebrations

Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain Folk Camp Meeting Religion, 1800-1845 (1974).

Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989).

Neville, Gwen Kennedy. Kinship and Pilgrimage: Rituals of Reunion in American Protestant Culture (1987).

Orsi, Robert A. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (1985).

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (1989).

Wilson, John Frederic. Public Religion in American Culture (1979).