IT MUST have been quite a sight, Memorial Day 1869 in Cincinnati, where “a crowd of thirty thousand gathered in a cemetery to observe the decoration of 745 graves of that community’s war dead,” as the historian David W. Blight describes it. “Among the processions was a disciplined line of hundreds of women, all dressed in ‘purest white’ and carrying baskets of flowers. At a signal, each woman stepped forward and cast her flowers on a grave. The scale of such an event would dwarf an All Saints Day procession in some European cities.” ...