International Workers' Day (May Day)

International Workers’ Day, also known to many as May Day, is the day of celebration. This day marks the day in history when people first started to strike against their employers. They demanded shorter days, going from twelve-hour work days to eight-hour work days. All around the world, people decided to go on strike, and all around the world riots occurred. After a while, May Day became an official holiday, and several countries around the world host parades to celebrate this movement. May Day is an official holiday in lots of countries, some of but not limited to Albania, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, North Korea, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, Venezuela, and Vietnam. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers_Day#History) In the United States however, May Day is not celebrated, instead we celebrate Labor Day, which happens in September. The reason the United States doesn’t celebrate May Day is because in 1887 President Cleveland feared that if May Day was celebrated on May 1, riots would commerce. Taking the safe way out, President Cleveland moved May Day to September. This is why we celebrate May Day in Labor day, and why many Americans don’t even know that a holiday such as May Day exists.

In order to live a good and meaningful life, people need to have a sense of history and the past struggles that previous Americans have suffered. Americans fought in the American Revolution, The Civil War, and other wars just to get to where we are now. By being unaware of our countries history we are disgracing past Americans who fought for our way of life. As the quote states, “history repeats itself”, but if we were unaware of history, we wouldn’t be able to survive like the past civilians had. By understanding history, we can get ourselves out of future problems that might occur. By understanding how wars were fought back then, and understanding how a winner was declared, we can understand how to protect ourselves (even though our methods might be more advanced). One thing to also understand is that even though we did not live through history, it affects everyone. America is the way it is because of the generations before us, and in the future America will be the way it is because of our generation. Although history might be a boring subject to some, it is also an important factor in our lives. We can’t rewrite our past history, but we can create our future history.

*information taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers_Day#History