Juneteenth (June 19) holidays are a good example of policy diffusion in the U.S. federal system. Texas was the first state to declare Juneteenth an official state holiday in 1979. By the time Congress acted on a Juneteenth federal-holiday bill in mid-2021, 49 states and Washington, DC, had already recognized Juneteenth as an official or ceremonial holiday. Juneteenth commemorates Union Major General Gordon Granger’s 1865 announcement in Galveston, Texas, that President Abraham Lincoln had freed enslaved African Americans in slave states two and a half years earlier (John Kincaid).
