Memorial Day has been observed on the last Monday of May since 1971.

It was originally known as Decoration Day, a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Memorial Day did not become the more common name until after World War II, and was not declared the official name by Federal law until 1967.

Memorial Day was a response to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War, in which some 620,000 soldiers on both sides died.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the National Moment of Remembrance Act, which asks Americans to pause for one minute at 3 p.m. in an act of national unity.

58,220 Americans died in the Vietnam War.

In war-torn battlefields, the red field poppy was one of the first plants to grow. The practice of wearing of poppies in honor of fallen soldiers was inspired by the poem In Flanders Fields, written in 1915 by Canadian soldier John McCrae.

In May 1868, General John A. Logan, the commander-in-chief of the Union veterans' group known as the Grand Army of the Republic, issued a decree that May 30 should become a nationwide day of commemoration for the more than 620,000 soldiers killed in the recently ended Civil War. On Decoration Day, as Logan dubbed it, Americans should lay flowers and decorate the graves of the war dead "whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land."

In 1871, Michigan made "Decoration Day" an official state holiday and by 1890, every northern state had followed suit, but states of the former Confederacy were hesitant to embrace a national holiday memorializing those who, in General Logan's words, "united to suppress the late rebellion."

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is located at Arlington National Cemetery, a United States military cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

Although 97 percent of employers have designated Memorial Day as a paid day off, more than 40 percent of companies still require at least some employees to work the holiday, according to a new study from Bloomberg BNA.