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May 28, 2021
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 | Where Did Memorial Day Originate? According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, approximately 25 cities and towns claim to have originated Memorial Day in the years immediately before Grand Army of the Republic leader John A. Logan designated May 30, 1868, as a day "for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion." The idea for Memorial Day (known as Decoration Day in the 1800s) did not arise with General Logan; he had been inspired by local commemorations of Civil War dead already being held in pockets throughout the North and the South, in some cases before the war had even concluded. The federal government weighed in on the debate over 50 years ago when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a May 26, 1966, proclamation that "officially recognized that the patriotic tradition of observing Memorial Day began one hundred years ago in Waterloo, New York." The small Finger Lakes village first staged an annual community-wide commemoration of its war dead on May 5, 1866, when businesses shuttered and residents draped buildings in black crepe and adorned soldiers' graves with flowers and flags. Although Congress designated Waterloo, now home to the National Memorial Day Museum, as the holiday's birthplace, the other contenders haven't been dissuaded. The argument over who gave birth to Memorial Day remains a holiday tradition. Check out these titles |
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 | Books on the Air An overview of talked-about books and authors. This weekly update, published every Friday, provides descriptions of recent TV and radio appearances by authors and their recently released books. See the hot titles from the media this week. |
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 | Michael Pollan Michael Pollan, who was born in 1955, grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University, from which he received a Master's in English. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer. For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. In 2003, Pollan was appointed the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. In 2017, he was appointed Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction at Harvard and the university's first Lewis Chan Lecturer in the Arts. In 2020, along with Dacher Keltner and others, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. The center will conduct research using psychedelics to investigate cognition, perception and emotion and their biological bases in the human brain. In addition to teaching, he lectures widely on food, agriculture, health, and psychedelic science. Check out his books here. |
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 | Library Reads June 2021 Library Reads-The top ten books published this month that library staff across the country love, with additional hall of fame authors. Check them out here |
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| A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.-Andrew Carnegie
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