On this day in 1959, facing a popular revolution spearheaded by Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista flees the island nation. Amid celebration and chaos in the Cuban capitol of Havana, the U.S. debated how best to deal with the radical Castro and the ominous rumblings of anti-Americanism in Cuba.
The U.S. government had supported Batista, a former soldier and Cuban dictator from 1933 to 1944, who seized power for...
Sabtu, 31 Desember 2016
Daily Quiz for January 1, 2017
The first actual person depicted on an U.S. coin was this American.
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Jumat, 30 Desember 2016
December 31, 1999: Panama Canal turned over to Panama
On this day in 1999, the United States, in accordance with the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, officially hands over control of the Panama Canal, putting the strategic waterway into Panamanian hands for the first time. Crowds of Panamanians celebrated the transfer of the 50-mile canal, which links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and officially opened when the SS Arcon sailed through on August 15, 1914. Since then, over 922,000 ships have used the canal.
Interest...
Daily Quiz for December 31, 2016
Known as the Fugio cent, the first American penny had the message “We Are One” on one side and this motto on the other side.
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5 Questions: A Timely Save
Civil War Trust President Jim Lighthizer, On the Rescue of a Storied Gettysburg landmark. Beside a busy highway on the outskirts of Gettysburg, Pa., stands a small stone house, known for where General Robert E. Lee directed his troops during the Battle of Gettysburg. Long obscured by commercial development, Lee’s headquarters during the historic battle …
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‘Maggots Held High Carnival’ Over Tom Waggoner’s Lifeless Corpse
Death came for Tom Waggoner at the end of a rope strung from a cottonwood tree in Wyoming on June 4, 1891. More than two weeks passed from the time of the lynching before anyone found his body, its feet resting on the ground and legs bent, as the rope had stretched before rigor mortis …
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Letters from Readers- June 2015 Wild West
MARIAS MASSACRE I was pleased you wrote about the little-known Baker Massacre (or, as some call it, the Marias Massacre)in the December 2014 Editor’s Letter. While researching for my third Western novel, Hunt for a Bride, I first came upon information about this horrific atrocity and decided to place it in my book, but from …
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Kamis, 29 Desember 2016
December 30, 1922: USSR established
In post-revolutionary Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is established, comprising a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics). Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism.
During the Russian Revolution...
Daily Quiz for December 30, 2016
George Washington in 1793, ran for reelection to the presidency unopposed as did this one other man.
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Rabu, 28 Desember 2016
December 29, 1890: U.S. Army massacres Indians at Wounded Knee
On this day in 1890, in the final chapter of America’s long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs. Many...
Daily Quiz for December 29, 2016
The Alamo was named for this.
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March 2017 Table of Contents
The March 2017 issue features a cover story about the 1979–81 Iran Hostage Crisis
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March 2017 Readers’ Letters
Readers sound off about Royal Navy jacks and ensigns, Marylander Samuel Smith and World War II submarine warfare
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Book Review: Waging War
David Barron chronicles the enduring and unresolved power struggle between the U.S. commander in chief and Congress
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Book Review: Men of War
Alexander Rose examines the American soldier through firsthand accounts from the Battles of Bunker Hill, Gettysburg and Iwo Jima
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Book Review: Mercenaries to Conquerors
Paul Brown argues that the Normans also deserve credit for victories in the Mediterranean and Balkans
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Book Review: Brothers at Arms
Larrie Ferreiro frames the American Revolutionary War in an international context
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Book Review: Hero of the Empire
Candice Millard relates Winston Churchill's capture and subsequent epic escape during the 1899–1902 Second Boer War
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Book Review: The Fleet at Flood Tide
James Hornfischer highlights the Pacific War dominance of the U.S. Navy in 1944–45
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AH-64D Apache Longbow
The AH-64D Apache Longbow came into its own during the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
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Hernán Cortés: Master of the Conquest
Hernán Cortés himself—not Spanish arms, smallpox or Mesoamerican allies—was the catalyst behind the stunning defeat of the Aztec empire
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U.S. Marine Sergeant Rocky Sickmann: A Hostage Remembers
Sickmann was one of 52 hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran who endured 444 days of captivity in 1979–81
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Selasa, 27 Desember 2016
December 28, 1895: First commercial movie screened
On this day in 1895, the world’s first commercial movie screening takes place at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the Cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers unveiled their invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumiere factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings screened a series of short scenes...
Daily Quiz for December 28, 2016
At 23, he became the youngest general in the Union Army.
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Senin, 26 Desember 2016
December 27, 1932: Radio City Music Hall opens
At the height of the Great Depression, thousands turn out for the opening of Radio City Music Hall, a magnificent Art Deco theater in New York City. Radio City Music Hall was designed as a palace for the people, a place of beauty where ordinary people could see high-quality entertainment. Since its 1932 opening, more than 300 million people have gone to Radio City to enjoy movies, stage shows, concerts, and special events.
Radio City Music Hall was...
Daily Quiz for December 27, 2016
Coxey’s Army was a movement to persuade the government to do this.
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How Did WWI Fliers Deal with Inclement Weather?
Dear Mr. History, While driving through the rainstorm yesterday, I thought to myself, “How did WW1 fliers deal with inclement weather? And was there a turning point as to when and what technology arrived to help flight during said storms? Thanks! Mark Drefs ??? Dear Mark, The Germans had a term for rain …
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Minggu, 25 Desember 2016
December 26, 1946: Bugsy Siegel opens Flamingo Hotel
On December 26, 1946, in Las Vegas, Nevada, mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel opens The Pink Flamingo Hotel & Casino at a total cost of $6 million. The 40-acre facility wasn’t complete and Siegel was hoping to raise some revenue with the grand opening.
Well-known singer and comedian Jimmy Durante headlined the entertainment, with music by Cuban band leader Xavier Cugat. Some of Siegel’s Hollywood friends, including actors George Raft, George Sanders,...
Daily Quiz for December 26, 2016
Daniel David Palmer developed this branch of alternative medicine.
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Sabtu, 24 Desember 2016
December 25, 1914: The Christmas Truce
Just after midnight on Christmas morning, the majority of German troops engaged in World War I cease firing their guns and artillery and commence to sing Christmas carols. At certain points along the eastern and western fronts, the soldiers of Russia, France, and Britain even heard brass bands joining the Germans in their joyous singing.
At the first light of dawn, many of the German soldiers emerged from their trenches and approached the Allied...
Daily Quiz for December 25, 2016
The October 25, 1774 Edenton Tea Party, a rebellion in North Carolina, was unique in this respect.
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Jumat, 23 Desember 2016
December 24, 1979: Soviet tanks roll into Afghanistan
On December 24, 1979, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, under the pretext of upholding the Soviet-Afghan Friendship Treaty of 1978.
As midnight approached, the Soviets organized a massive military airlift into Kabul, involving an estimated 280 transport aircraft and three divisions of almost 8,500 men each. Within a few days, the Soviets had secured Kabul, deploying a special assault unit against Tajberg Palace. Elements of the Afghan army loyal...
Daily Quiz for December 24, 2016
Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa is named for Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, a minister who lost his pastorate in Washington D.C. due to holding this political position.
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Kamis, 22 Desember 2016
December 23, 1888: Van Gogh chops off ear
On this day in 1888, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, suffering from severe depression, cuts off the lower part of his left ear with a razor while staying in Arles, France.He later documented the event in a painting titled Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. Today, Van Gogh is regarded as an artistic genius and his masterpieces sell for record-breaking prices; however, during his lifetime, he was a poster boy for tortured starving artists and sold only...
Daily Quiz for December 23, 2016
A legendary athlete, Dan Patch excelled in this sport.
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Rabu, 21 Desember 2016
December 22, 1956: First gorilla born in captivity
On this day in 1956, a baby gorilla named Colo enters the world at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio, becoming the first-ever gorilla born in captivity. Weighing in at approximately 4 pounds, Colo, a western lowland gorilla whose name was a combination of Columbus and Ohio, was the daughter of Millie and Mac, two gorillas captured in French Cameroon, Africa, who were brought to the Columbus Zoo in 1951. Before Colo’s birth, gorillas found at zoos were caught...
Daily Quiz for December 22, 2016
Jessie Field Shambaugh founded this service organization.
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Book Review: Robert Morris’s Folly- The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder
Robert Morris’s Folly: The Architectural and Financial Failures of an American Founder by Ryan K. Smith, Yale University Press FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE, Robert Morris was a man of wealth and prominence. A successful businessman, he owned factories on the Delaware River and land in Philadelphia, and used his own funds to save George …
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Book Review: Rebel Souls- Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians
Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians by Justin Martin, Da Capo HENRY CLAPP JR., an itinerant journalist and lecturer from Massachusetts, had the good fortune to visit Paris in 1849. He was just in time to experience the bohemian café society chronicled by Henry Murger, whose sketches inspired a play, Scènes de la …
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Trade Off: Exchanging German-Americans for POWs in WWII
Eleven-year-old Ingrid Eiserloh’s world changed forever on January 8, 1942, one month and one day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the catalyst for America’s entry into World War II. Even in tiny Strongsville, Ohio, where Ingrid lived, the unbearable news of Japan’s crippling strike rolled of newspaper drums and hummed across radio signals. …
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Eye on World War I: Red Cross Volunteer Margaret Hall
Whether describing keeping warm in a cold-water fat, making change in a language she imperfectly under- stands or trekking across the bare hillocks and deep trenches of the battlefield at Douaumont, France, Margaret Hall’s voice is steady, self-deprecating and shrewd. At 42, Hall was among the elite Americans who could afford to pay their room, …
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Empress of Journalism: Mrs. Frank Leslie
Mrs. Frank Leslie, the glamorous, diamond-studded owner of a publishing empire, earned her reputation as the ‘best newspaper man’ in New York. When Frank Leslie, founder of the Leslie Publishing House and the Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, died in January 1880, he left his wife, Miriam, with crushing debts and lawsuits. But the 44-year-old widow …
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Andrew Carnegie: Robber Baron Turned Robin Hood
Blood flowed when Carnegie Steel busted the union in 1892, but little of it splashed on Andrew Carnegie. The magnate turned his attention to philanthropy, and his good works still benefit people around the globe. What should we make of the complicated capitalist whose legacy includes this advice to the mega-rich: Give something back while …
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Selasa, 20 Desember 2016
December 21, 1988: Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Scotland
On this day in 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York explodes in midair over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground. A bomb hidden inside an audio cassette player detonated in the cargo area when the plane was at an altitude of 31,000 feet. The disaster, which became the subject of Britain’s largest criminal investigation, was believed to be an attack against...
Daily Quiz for December 21, 2016
The Kate Shelley High Bridge in Boone, Iowa is named in honor of a seventeen year old girl who did this.
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Letter from the Editor- February 2015 American History
Breaking Fevers, Sharing Wealth, Being Frank A CITY PANICKED by a spreading virus that leaves thousands dying in its wake and civil authorities with little recourse other than to quarantine the afflicted and collect the dead—while feebly attempting to fend of mass hysteria. The foregoing scenario may be similar to the Ebola outbreak playing out …
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Slavery as an Industrial Cornerstone: Interview with Edward E. Baptist
IN HIS BOOK The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books), Cornell history professor Edward E. Baptist documents how a brutally productive and expanding slave system, not free wage workers, created the powerful cotton industry that drove economic growth, prosperity and industrialization in the 19th century, and presaged …
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American Mosaic – February 2015
Boston Honors Prickly Poe Orphan, West Point dropout, critic, poet, novelist, magazine editor and literary innovator, Edgar Allan Poe packed a lot of living into his short 40 years. Tough he spent few of those years in his birthplace of Boston he nonetheless developed a towering disdain for Frogpondians, his nickname for moralizing Bostonians. Now …
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Letters from Readers- February 2015 American History
Freedom’s Just Another Word I was surprised when I saw the cover of your December 2014 issue. Robert E. Lee may still have many admirers, but as far as I know, he was a traitor to his country and should have been hanged after the Civil War. Jorge M. Robert Orlando & Ocoee, Fla. How …
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Book Review: The World of Raymond Chandler- In His Own Words
The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words edited by Barry Day Knopf IN HIS LIFETIME (1888-1959), Raymond Chandler was known for just seven novels, a dozen or so stories, two film scripts (for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) and a famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” …
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Book Review: The First Lady of Radio- Eleanor Roosevelt’s Historic Broadcasts
The First Lady of Radio: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Historic Broadcasts edited by Stephen Drury Smith, The New Press WERE ELEANOR ROOSEVELT alive today and active in public life, there is no doubt she’d be making ample use of social media to convey her progressive social and political viewpoints. But she lived before our digital breakthroughs and …
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The First Whistleblowers
Risking all to expose corruption and crime is deeply rooted in the American ethos. Long before the likes of Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, a small group of Revolutionary War sailors took great chances to report misdeeds to the Continental Congress In February 1777 Captain of Marines John Grannis furtively departed the frigate near Providence, …
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Senin, 19 Desember 2016
December 20, 1957: Elvis Presley is drafted
On this day in 1957, while spending the Christmas holidays at Graceland, his newly purchased Tennessee mansion, rock-and-roll star Elvis Presley receives his draft notice for the United States Army.
With a suggestive style–one writer called him “Elvis the Pelvis”–a hit movie, Love Me Tender, and a string of gold records including “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel,” Presley had become a national icon, and the...
Daily Quiz for December 20, 2016
Scout’s Rest, the home of this western star, is now a state historical park.
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What Countries Were the First to Have Homosexual Rights?
What Countries Were the First to Have Homosexual Rights?
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Minggu, 18 Desember 2016
December 19, 1998: President Clinton impeached
After nearly 14 hours of debate, the House of Representatives approves two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, charging him with lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. Clinton, the second president in American history to be impeached, vowed to finish his term.
In November 1995, Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old unpaid intern. Over the course of a year and a half, the president...
Daily Quiz for December 19, 2016
Who is quoted as saying, “All the good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow?”
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The Thin Red Line Between Fact and Fiction
Each man fought his own war—on Guadalcanal and in James Jones’s novel
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Sabtu, 17 Desember 2016
December 18, 1620: Mayflower docks at Plymouth Harbor
On December 18, 1620, the British ship Mayflower docked at modern-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, and its passengers prepared to begin their new settlement, Plymouth Colony.
The famous Mayflower story began in 1606, when a group of reform-minded Puritans in Nottinghamshire, England, founded their own church, separate from the state-sanctioned Church of England. Accused of treason, they were forced to leave the country and settle in the more tolerant...
Daily Quiz for December 18, 2016
Fort Sumter in South Carolina, is named for Thomas Sumter who had become famous for his service in this war.
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Book Review: The Fleet at Flood Tide by James D. Hornfischer
In June 1944, on the eve of the invasion of Saipan, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of joint forces in the Pacific Ocean Areas, had estimated that the Pacific War had passed through three phases. In the first, Japan expanded while America recovered from Pearl Harbor, secured lines of communication, and stopped the Japanese at …
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Daily Quiz for December 17, 2016
Caleb Davis Bradham of North Carolina invented this treat.
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Jumat, 16 Desember 2016
December 17, 1903: First airplane flies
Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright make the first successful flight in history of a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Orville piloted the gasoline-powered, propeller-driven biplane, which stayed aloft for 12 seconds and covered 120 feet on its inaugural flight.
Orville and Wilbur Wright grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and developed an interest in aviation after learning of the glider flights of the German engineer Otto Lilienthal...
Pearl Harbor Mystery
Military History Editor Stephen Harding, author of “Dawn of Infamy: A Sunken Ship, a Vanished Crew, and the Final Mystery of Pearl Harbor,” discusses his new book with Military Times Executive Editor Tony Lombardo.
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Time Travel: Back to the Battle for Crete
Looking back 75 years to the fierce Battle of Crete
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Book Review: Blitzkrieg by Lloyd Clark
Blitzkrieg is a particularly successful synergy of correspondence and interviews, archival material from four countries, and the massive body of published literature addressing one of warmaking’s greatest surprises: the German conquest of France and its Low Countries in fewer than six weeks during May and June 1940. This phenomenon has been commonly explained as the …
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Kamis, 15 Desember 2016
December 16, 1773: The Boston Tea Party
In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor.
The midnight raid, popularly known as the “Boston Tea Party,” was in protest of the British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the...
Daily Quiz for December 16, 2016
The first Wal-Mart store opened in this year.
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Daily Quiz for December 16, 2016
The first Wal-Mart store opened in this year.
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Mexico’s Lindbergh: Emilio Carranza
If you’re not looking for it, you might drive right past it. Some people riding through Wharton State Forest near Tabernacle, N.J., look for it and south of Red Lion Circle, bear of Route 206 onto Carranza Road. Keep an eye to the still miss it. About a mile right, and in a lonely clearing, …
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Stand Watie’s War: The Last Confederate General
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. Lt. Col. Ely Parker, Grant’s military secretary and a Seneca Indian, recalled that Lee shook his hand and said, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker replied, “We are all Americans.” …
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Letter from the Editor – April 2015 American History
WITH THIS ISSUE of American History, Volume 50, No. 1, we step over the threshold into our fifth decade. As the oldest continuously published magazine dedicated to our nation’s history, we remain devoted—as the very first issue in April 1966 proclaimed—“to make the intrinsically fascinating story of America come to life.” Why, and how, did …
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Have We Misread Huckleberry Finn?: Interview of Andrew Levy
IN HUCK FINN’S AMERICA: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece (Simon & Schuster), Butler University professor Andrew Levy examines America’s cultural landscape in the mid-1880s, when the book was published, and takes a close look at Twain and the factors that influenced his writing (minstrelsy and fatherhood, to name two). Levy comes …
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Hemingway and the Roosevelts at the Movies
“IT WAS MARVELOUS,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “The battle was spread out before us.” Hemingway, America’s most famous writer, was crouching in a bombed-out building in Madrid with several other reporters, including Martha Gellhorn, who was his mistress and would later become his third wife. It was April 1937 and they were covering the Spanish Civil …
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American Mosaic – April 2015 American History
The World Grieves for Lincoln After President Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, condolences poured in from across the nation—and beyond. Within the voluminous collection of the Illinois-based Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project are letters from abroad lamenting the loss. They came from heads of state as well as obscure groups like the French-speaking Federal …
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Letters from Readers – April 2015 American History
History Under Wraps You never know when you will learn something! I was completely unaware of Germans in the United States being sent to internment camps and then back to Germany during World War II until I read “Trade-Off” in the February 2015 issue. My dad was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1912. My grandfather …
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Book Review: Hitler’s Soldiers-The German Army in the Third Reich
The German army had its ups and downs during World War II, winning a series of dramatic early victories and then suffering a parade of catastrophic defeats until the final collapse of 1945. Its historical reputation has followed the same pattern. Most military writers loved it in the immediate postwar years. They admired its innovative …
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Rabu, 14 Desember 2016
December 15, 2001: Leaning Tower of Pisa reopens
On this day in 2001, Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa reopens after a team of experts spent 11 years and $27 million to fortify the tower without eliminating its famous lean.
In the 12th century, construction began on the bell tower for the cathedral of Pisa, a busy trade center on the Arno River in western Italy, some 50 miles from Florence. While construction was still in progress, the tower’s foundation began to sink into the soft, marshy ground,...
Daily Quiz for December 15, 2016
In 1924 fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft ghostwrote a story for this magician.
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Book Review: The Top of His Game- The Best Sportswriting of W.C. Heinz
The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W.C. Heinz Edited by Bill Littlefield, The Library of America In 1946 Damon Runyon, the writer and newspaperman, was in the hospital dying of throat cancer. A friend asked him who he thought was the best young sportswriter in New York. Runyon could not speak but …
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Book Review: Nellie Bly and Investigative Journalism for Kids
Nellie Bly and Investigative Journalism for Kids: Mighty Muckrakers From the Golden Age to Today by Ellen Mahoney, Chicago Review press GOT A YOUNGSTER with an inquiring mind, writing skill and a bit of moxie? If so, s/he might be excited to read Nellie Bly and Investigative Journalism for Kids (Chicago Review Press). Bly was …
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Book Review: Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells- The Best of Early Vanity Fair
Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair edited by Graydon Carter with David Friend THERE WERE a lot of smart magazines of opinion and culture in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—among them The Outlook, The Century, The Nation and The New Yorker. There were also four different …
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Call the Midwife: Nurses on Horseback in the Appalachian Mountains
Maternity is the young woman’s battlefield,” wrote Mary Breckinridge in 1927. “It is more dangerous, more painful, more mutilating than war, and as inexorable as all the laws of God.” Breckinridge’s theater of operations was Leslie County, Ky., deep in the heart of the Cumberland Mountains. There were no paved roads in the county then, …
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Southern Showdown: American Patriots Fight the Loyalists in South Carolina
In 1778 it was clear to the British that three years of fighting in New England and the Mid-Atlantic had settled nothing. Loyalist uprisings that were expected in places like New York and Pennsylvania had not materialized. France had intervened on the side of the United States, convincing the British to hunker down in the …
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Letter from the Editor- June 2015 American History
THIS APRIL we mark the 150th anniversary of the ending of the American Civil War. The Confederate surrender on the ninth day of that month followed a week of desperate maneuvering by the remaining Rebel army in Virginia to evade the Union forces that were closing in on Richmond. With the fall of Petersburg, Rebels …
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James Madison Enchants Harriet Martineau
IT MUST HAVE BEEN AN ODD SIGHT. Former president James Madison—83 years old, hobbled with rheumatism and half deaf— sprawled across an easy chair in a black silk dressing gown, his cold arthritic hands encased in gray gloves, his head propped on a pillow and topped with a warm white cap. Meanwhile, his visitor—Harriet Martineau, …
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Mystery Ship: January 2017
Can you identify this floatplane freighter? Click here for the answer.
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Mystery Ship: January 2017
Fleet 50 Freighter First flown on February 22, 1938, the Fleet 50 Freighter belonged to that rare breed of aircraft called the bush plane. It was designed and built in Canada, a nation long associated with that highly specialized facet of aviation. In that respect, one might think of the Fleet 50 as the granddaddy …
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American Mosaic – June 2015 American History
Spy, Nurse, Cook, Commander ON JANUARY 5 a bronze bust honoring Harriet Tubman’s daring feats was installed at the governor’s mansion in Annapolis. The Maryland native is famous for helping some 300 slaves escape the antebellum South, but her Union Army service as not only nurse and cook but as spy, scout and commander is …
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Letters from Readers – June 2015 American History
Waiting for Stand Thanks so much for the long-overdue article on Stand Watie (“Stand Watie’s War,” April 2015). It was great to see a colorized picture of Watie on the cover. For Cherokee history scholars/buffs, he’s a key figure that few talk about. As author Theda Perdue pointed out, the Cherokee Nation suffered enough as …
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The Sounds of Silence
Acoustic shadows bedeviled commanders on both sides during the war. “I received with astonishment the intelligence of the severe fighting that commenced at 2 o’clock. Not a musket shot had been heard nor did the sound of artillery indicate anything like a battle.” So said Union Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell when he appeared …
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Moses Comes Calling
Harriet Tubman helped plan a South Carolina river raid that freed hundreds of slaves. When the Civil War began, Harriet Tubman had already been a freedom fighter for more than a decade. As a renowned abolitionist and intrepid Underground Railroad conductor who went into slave territory to lead refugees to safety in the North and …
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Shore Party: The Truth Behind the Famous MacArthur Photo
During his famed return to the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur quickly recognized the power of a photograph
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Selasa, 13 Desember 2016
December 14, 1911: Amundsen reaches South Pole
Norwegian Roald Amundsen becomes the first explorer to reach the South Pole, beating his British rival, Robert Falcon Scott.
Amundsen, born in Borge, near Oslo, in 1872, was one of the great figures in polar exploration. In 1897, he was first mate on a Belgian expedition that was the first ever to winter in the Antarctic. In 1903, he guided the 47-ton sloop Gjöa through the Northwest Passage and around the Canadian coast, the first navigator to accomplish...
Daily Quiz for December 14, 2016
On January 12, 1998, 19 European nations signed an agreement banning this.
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Book Review: On a Great Battlefield
On a Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933–2013 Jennifer M. Murray University of Tennessee Press Gettysburg is a household name, and the historic battle normally produces several military studies a year. Nearly as many books have appeared concerning the aftermath of the battle, including Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address …
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Book Review: Finding Whimsy in the Grim Business of War
“I Am Busy Drawing Pictures”: The Civil War Art and Letters of Private John Jacob Omenhausser, CSA Edited by Ross M. Kimmel and Michael P. Musick Friends of the Maryland State Archives On May 19, 1864, John J. Omenhausser of the 46th Virginia Infantry penned a letter to the woman he had just asked to …
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Book Review: Rebels in the Rockies- Confederate Irregulars in the Western Territories
Rebels in the Rockies: Confederate Irregulars in the Western Territories Walter Pittman McFarland Tony Horowitz may indeed have discovered Confederates in the attic, but Walter Pittman claims to have found Rebels in the Rockies, or at least irregular fighters scattered throughout the mountain Southwest who favored the Southern cause. Pittman concedes that he has “no …
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Book Reviews: Embattled Rebel- Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief
Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief James M. McPherson Penguin Press In his previous works, particularly Tried by War presents a consistently positive, James McPherson assessment of Abraham Lincoln’s management of the Union war effort. In Embattled Rebel, McPherson turns his attention to Lincoln’s counterpart in Richmond and, while unapologetically unsympathetic to the …
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Book Review: The Battle of Allatoona Pass
The Battle of Allatoona Pass: Civil War Skirmish in Bartow County, Georgia Brad Butkovich The History Press Some Civil War encounters made up for their less than epic scale in their disproportionate intensity, and Brad Butkovich’s examination of the fight for Allatoona Pass on October 5, 1864—lent more intimate detail by the discovery of new …
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Review: Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits’ -Mutter Museum
Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits: Injury, Death & Healing in Civil War Philadelphia The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, through 2018 muttermuseum.org IN “BROKEN BODIES, SUFFERING SPIRITS,”a new exhibition on injury, death and healing in the Civil War, a display on 19th-century surgical tools receives innovative treatment. Instead of merely showing a …
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The Song That Marches On: History of the Battle Hymn of the Republic
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is far more popular today than it was during the Civil War—beloved by Northerners and Southerners, conservatives and radicals, whites and blacks. The song’s origins have long been shrouded in obscurity. The tune is often attributed to William Steffe, a South Carolina native who settled in Philadelphia. Steffe claimed, …
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‘Forage Liberally on the Country’: Sherman’s Troops Forage in the March to the Sea
IN A REGULAR CAMPAIGN, only a small proportion of the men would have been designated as foragers, and that was the basic idea in Sherman’s March as well. What complicates this was the expansiveness of Sherman’s orders, directing the army to “forage liberally on the country during the march,” and empowering commanders to destroy buildings …
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Control the Heartland: Union Ironclads in the Western Theater
A peculiar fleet of shallow-draft, heavily armed gunboats patrolled the tributaries around Cairo, Ill., by the fall of 1861. These Yankee invaders had been pieced together using a variety of nascent naval technologies, and would have a profound impact on the Western Theater fighting. The gunboats’ immediate contribution was to establish tenuous control of waterways …
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Arlington’s Enslaved Savior: Selina Gray
In October 1866, as the country was still in the early stages of recovering from the Civil War, a U.S. government party arrived on the doorstep of the Custis-Lee home at Arlington, the grand Greek revival mansion high on the hill overlooking Washington D.C. Robert E. Lee had left the home at the war’s outbreak, …
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Casting a Wide Net for Lincoln’s Legacy: Conversation with Daniel Stowell
Today’s presidents begin planning their libraries even before they leave office, but in Abraham Lincoln’s day such libraries did not exist, nor was there any formal procedure for collecting presidential documents. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project, led by director Daniel Stowell, is making up for that by canvassing the country for documents written to, …
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Unconventional Warfare: Should Confederates have pursued wide-scale guerrilla resistance?
Guerrillas did not play a major role in shaping the military outcome of the Civil War. First to last, conventional armies com- posed of citizen-soldiers waged operations that dictated swings of national morale, determined control over the most important waterways and logistical areas of the Confederacy and, ultimately, decided the fate of slavery. Of the …
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Letters from Readers- February 2015 Civil War Times
Fantastic Field Book I was very glad to see the December “Battlefields & Beyond” about the Confederate blockade of the Potomac River. I have been interested in that operation for many years. My great-grandfather Samuel Sydney Gause Jr., was involved in that operation. He was a private in Company G of the 1st Arkansas Infantry, …
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Unstoppable Force
In occupied Germany, there was one battle the Allies couldn’t win
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Senin, 12 Desember 2016
December 13, 2000: Al Gore concedes presidential election
Vice President Al Gore reluctantly concedes defeat to Texas Governor George W. Bush in his bid for the presidency, following weeks of legal battles over the recounting of votes in Florida, on this day in 2000.
In a televised speech from his ceremonial office next to the White House, Gore said that while he was deeply disappointed and sharply disagreed with the Supreme Court verdict that ended his campaign, ”partisan rancor must now be put aside.”
“I...
Daily Quiz for December 13, 2016
In 1985 this famed American road was officially decommissioned.
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How Did Early Hunter-Gatherers Trade?
How Did Early Hunter-Gatherers Trade?
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The Korsun Noose
Encircled by an overwhelming and vengeful Soviet army, German soldiers on the Eastern Front desperately searched for a way out. The calendar reads January 30, 1944. The clock says 2 p.m. The thermometer? Well, let’s just call it cold. A small group of German infantrymen—landser in the vernacular, “ground pounders”—are huddled around a map …
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Footlocker: Solving Readers’ Artifact Mysteries
Curators at The National World War II Museum solve readers’ artifact mysteries
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Minggu, 11 Desember 2016
December 12, 1980: Da Vinci notebook sells for over 5 million
On this day in 1980, American oil tycoon Armand Hammer pays $5,126,000 at auction for a notebook containing writings by the legendary artist Leonardo da Vinci.
The manuscript, written around 1508, was one of some 30 similar books da Vinci produced during his lifetime on a variety of subjects. It contained 72 loose pages featuring some 300 notes and detailed drawings, all relating to the common theme of water and how it moved. Experts have said that...