Category: History

Dakota entered the Union as the 39th and 40th states on this date in 1889.

became the 36th state on this date in 1864, just in time to cast two electoral votes for Abraham Lincoln.

From a review of Peter Charles Hoffer’s Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud — American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin in The Boston Globe:

American history,” he writes, “is two-faced” — split between celebratory popularizers who often value rousing narrative over scholarly rigor and academic specialists whose jargon-riddled, often dour monographs ignore the ordinary reader. Meanwhile, Hoffer accuses the American Historical Association (AHA), where he has served as an adviser on plagiarism and a member of its professional standards division, of abdicating its responsibility to enforce basic scholarly principles in both realms.

Hoffer revisits the now-familiar cases of a quartet of historians brought low by scandal in 2002: former Emory University professor Michael Bellesiles, who was accused of falsifying data in “Arming America,” his controversial 2000 study of 18th- and 19th-century gun culture; Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, who were both found to have used material from other scholars without full attribution; and Mount Holyoke’s Joseph Ellis, who was rebuked for spinning tales of his nonexistent Vietnam combat record in classes and newspaper articles. According to Hoffer, these were not just isolated incidents but symptoms of a wider problem — one that goes far beyond the headlines to the very way history is written and consumed in America.

It’s an interesting review with comments from several prominent historians.

On October 19, 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, giving up almost 8000 men and any chance of winning the Revolutionary War. Cornwallis had marched his army into the Virginia port town earlier that summer expecting to meet British ships sent from New York. The ships never arrived.

In early October, some 17,000 American and French troops led by Generals George Washington and Jean-Baptiste Rochambeau surrounded British-occupied Yorktown. Off the coast, French Admiral François de Grasse strategically positioned his naval fleet to control access to the town via the Chesapeake Bay and the York River.

The Franco-American siege exhausted the British army’s supplies of food and ammunition. With no hope for escape, Cornwallis agreed to the terms of Washington’s Articles of Capitulation, signing the document at Moore House on October 19. Hours after the surrender, the general’s defeated troops marched out of Yorktown to the tune “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown effectively ended the Revolutionary War. Lacking the financial resources to raise a new army, the British government appealed to the Americans for peace. Almost two years later, on September 3, 1783, the signing of the Treaty of Paris brought the war to an end.

[Source: Library of Congress]

From the Library of Congress:

Late on the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty-one armed followers stole into the town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) as most of its residents slept. The men–among them three free blacks, one freed slave, and one fugitive slave–hoped to spark a rebellion of freed slaves and to lead an “army of emancipation” to overturn the institution of slavery by force. To these ends the insurgents took some sixty prominent locals including Col. Lewis Washington (great-grand nephew of George Washington) as hostages and seized the town’s United States arsenal and its rifle works.

The upper hand which nighttime surprise had afforded the raiders quickly eroded, and by the evening of October 17, the conspirators who were still alive were holed-up in an engine house. In order to be able to distinguish between insurgents and hostages, marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee waited for daylight on October 18 to storm the building.

…

For his actions, Brown was quickly tried and convicted of murder, slave insurrection, and treason against the state and sentenced to death by hanging. The simplicity and sincerity of Brown’s address after his sentencing astounded listeners on both sides of the issue. While awaiting his fate in the Harper’s Ferry jail, he received a sympathetic letter from Massachusetts writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. “I think of you night and day,” she wrote, “bleeding in prison, surrounded by hostile faces, sustained only by trust in God and your own heart. I long to nurse you–to speak to you sisterly words of sympathy and consolation.”

Brown declined her offer, asking instead that she contribute to the financial support of his surviving family which included two daughters-in-law whose husbands had been killed in the raid. “Would you not,” he wrote, “as soon contribute fifty cents now, and a like sum yearly, for the relief of those very poor and deeply afflicted persons, to enable them to supply themselves and their children with bread and very plain clothing, and to enable the children to receive a common English education?”

There’s much more.

John Kenneth Galbraith (96 today) once wrote a speech for President Lyndon Johnson. Galbraith was a very prominent economist and not a speech writer, but he worked diligently on the draft and was impressed with what he produced. It was given to LBJ who, out of respect for the economist, told him personally what he thought.

“Ken,” LBJ said. “Writing a speech is a lot like wetting your pants. What feels warm and comforting to you can just seem cold and sticky to everyone else.”

While campaigning for the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest in Milwaukee on this date in 1912. He went ahead with his scheduled speech.

They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Christopher Columbus writing in his log upon meeting the Arawaks.

welcomed its first students on this date in 1868.

if it’s Westinghouse. George Westinghouse was born on this date in 1846 in Central Bridge, New York.

In 1869, Westinghouse received a patent for the air brake, which permitted the locomotive engineer to apply the brakes equally to all cars. Previously brakemen had applied the brakes manually and accidents were common. The invention was adopted by most railroads worldwide.

In 1884, Westinghouse formed Westinghouse Electric and acquired Nikola Tesla’s patents for alternating current. He was opposed by Thomas Edison whose own company (General Electric) fostered direct current. Ultimately, of course, alternating current (and Westinghouse) emerged victorious, but not before one of the more gruesome battles in industrial competion. The following is from the Kirkus review of Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair:

Enron and Worldcom executives take heart: this grim account of the origins of execution by electrocution proves that business-based sleaze can go a lot further than accounting fraud. As Moran (Sociology/Mount Holyoke Coll.) shows, the Edison Electric Co., with Thomas A. himself at the helm, relentlessly lobbied the State of New York in 1890 to establish electrocution as the preferred “humane” disposal of those given the death penalty. What actually motivated Edison, despite his professed opposition to capital punishment, was his rivalry with the Westinghouse Company for the vast US market for electrical lighting and power. Edison equipment generated only direct current (DC), but the tide was turning towards the Westinghouse alternative, AC power. Each side claimed that the other had serious safety deficiencies. By persuading authorities to adopt alternating current for the death chair, Edison and his minions hoped to foster a public image of AC as the truly “lethal” form of electricity. Moran spares readers no details of the gruesomely botched first electrocution at Auburn Prison in August 1890, during which convicted murderer William Kemmler was seen by some witnesses to “suffer horribly,” as current from the Westinghouse dynamo (purchased under false pretenses) was shut off twice while attending doctors pondered the presence of respiration and heartbeat, then switched on again. Its proponents, however, continued to endorse electrocution as a best-case method (absent the bungling at Auburn) while the debate continued over decades. The author points out that we still don’t know exactly how electricity kills a human being (cardiac arrest being the prime suspect), and survivors of serious accidental shocks do report varieties of excruciating pain.

Westinghouse opposed the execution, of course, and even helped fund Kemmler’s appeals, but Westinghouse’s money was no match for Edison’s celebrity.

Today marks the anniversary of the first American train robbery. An east bound Ohio & Mississippi passenger train was boarded by the Reno brothers near Seymour, Indiana, on this date in 1866.

The Today in History page at the Library of Congress (redesigned since yesterday) provides background about train robberies and early railroads including this excerpt from “The Early Days in Silver City” —

I happened to be riding that train. I had gone overland to Safford and Solemisvelle prospecting. I decided to come home Thanksgiving to be with my family at Silver City. I boarded the train at Wilcox. There was a large shipment of gold on the train. Just out of Steins Pass we could see a large bon-fire. One of the trainmen remarked, ‘Wonder what the big fire is, I hope we don’t run into any trouble.’ The bon-fire we discovered to our sorrow was on the R. R. Then as today curiosity got the best of some of us so we had to find out why the train came to an abrupt stop, and what the bon-fire was put on the track. We found ourselves looking into the barrel of guns.

was established on this date in 1986. This web site has details (including music when the page is opened).

It’s the birthday of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 19th President of the United States. Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, on this date in 1822.

As the Library of Congress tells it:

Rutherford B. Hayes became…president in 1877 after a bitterly-contested election against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Tilden won the popular vote, but disputed electoral ballots from four states prompted Congress to create a special electoral commission to decide the election’s result. The fifteen-man commission of congressmen and Supreme Court justices, eight of whom were Republicans, voted along party lines deciding the election in Hayes’s favor.

The Writer’s Almanac has a nice piece on America’s premier patriot. (You can listen to Garrison Keillor here [RealAudio].)

It’s the birthday of statesman and patriot Samuel Adams, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1722). As a young man, he tried to go into business for himself with some money his father had given him, but the business failed and he lost everything. He got a job as a tax collector, but he failed to collect any taxes and his accounting books were a mess. It wasn’t until the British passed the Sugar Act of 1764 that he found his purpose in life. He was one of the first members of the colonies to speak out against taxation without representation and one of the first people to argue for the colonies’ independence from Great Britain. He was the leader of the American radicals, and he was almost maniacal in his pursuit of American independence. He organized riots and wrote propaganda, describing the British as murderers and slave drivers. Adams said, “Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason,” and he had a genius for stirring up feelings. In one speech he said, “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace … Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” He was so influential in his opposition to the British that British soldiers tried to arrest him, but he and John Hancock hid in a farmhouse and weren’t found. He went on to become one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and participated in the Continental Congress. He said, “It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.”

And a damn fine beer.

Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure was September 17, 1862. The battle waged on that date, close by Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg in western Maryland, took a human toll never exceeded on any other single day in the nation’s history. So intense and sustained was the violence, a man recalled, that for a moment in his mind’s eye the very landscape around him turned red.

Stephen W. Sears
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

On September 17, 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met for the last time to sign the document and send it to the states for ratification.

Poynter.org has a gallery of front pages from September 11 and 12, 2001.

was admitted to the Union as the 31st state on this date in 1850.

The conclusion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in Washington on this date in 1963.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. And this will be the day, this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring — from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring — from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring — from the heightening Alleghenies of
Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring — from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring — from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that.

Let freedom ring — from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring — from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring — from every hill and molehill of Mississippi,
from every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,

“Free at last, free at last.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

the 36th President of the United States, was born on this date in 1908.