Todd DePastino “Contrabands,” escaped slaves enlisted in the Union Army, 1861-1865(courtesy Library of Congress) The Civil War ended slavery. But it didn’t do so everywhere, all at once, on one date. Emancipation came in fits and starts over five full years between 1861-1865. “Juneteenth”—the day in 1865 when enslaved
(American Legion) (American Legion) I somehow missed this an old news item about the discovery of a Vietnam War memorial outside of Philadelphia in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. In 2012, someone was clearing brush at an old bank parking lot and discovered a distinctive Vietnam War monument. No one
It was originally called Decoration Day, and it was always May 30. Until 1971, what we call Memorial Day fell invariably on May 30, a date chosen in 1868 by General John Logan, commander of the Grand Army of the Republic (our nation’s first veterans organization). In his famous General Order No.
(Daguerrotype of Samuel Morse, 1840. Perhaps taken by Louis Daguerre himself) He was a master portrait artist, a virulent hater of Catholics, and a supporter of slavery. He did NOT invent the telegraph. Nor did he single-handedly create the dot-dash text encoding method that bears his name. Samuel Morse, however,
By Charles Nesbitt US Army Nineteen-seventy-two was a year of terror in West Germany. The Red Army Faction, a left-wing extremist group also known as the Baader–Meinhof Gang, went on a rampage that began with bombings and escalated to assassinations, kidnappings, bank robberies and shoot-outs with police. In the
When Congress created Maritime Day in 1933 hardly anyone noticed. It was in the First Hundred Days of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and all eyes were upon the alphabet-soup of agencies rolling out like new Model Bs off Ford’s assembly line: the AAA, CCC, NRA, TVA, FDIC. But designating May 22 for
