Category: History

According to the History Channel, the first store in what was to become Denver opened on this date in 1858. “Denver and its first store were created to serve the miners working the placer gold deposits discovered a year before at the confluence of Cheery Creek and the South Platte River.”

Black Tuesday

The Volstead Act was passed on this date in 1919. The Volstead Act provided for enforcement of the 18th Amendment (Prohibition).

was in Tombstone, Arizona, on this date in 1881. Three dead — Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury — and three wounded — Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday. Wyatt Earp, Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne were unharmed.

The Earps and Holliday were charged with murder but found not guilty.

was established on this date in 1945.

American Heritage has an entertaining feature: Overrated and Underrated. Topics covered:

Airplane
Architect
Baseball Manager
Business Scandal
Comedian
Criminal
Founding Father
Frontiersman
Golfer
Innovator
Inventor
Movie Classic
Musical
Philosopher
Photograph
Political Slogan
Rock ‘n’ Roll Moment
Sitcom
Small War
Tank
War Song

I can remember the milk man (horse drawn), the bread man, the rag man (junk dealer) and even my mom’s coffee man, but I don’t remember the phonograph man.

Photo from The American Experience: Edison’s Miracle of Light.

Garry Wills has a fascinating article in The New York Review of Books on “the protection and extension of slavery through the three-fifths clause in the Constitution.”

Though aware of the clause of course, I had never really thought about how it skewed elections. If you owned slaves, you had your vote and three more for every five slaves you owned. As Wills states, “It was with the help of that clause that Jefferson won the presidential election in 1800.” Wills quotes the historian Leonard Richards:

In the sixty-two years between Washington’s election and the Compromise of 1850, for example, slaveholders controlled the presidency for fifty years, the Speaker’s chair for forty-one years, and the chairmanship of House Ways and Means [the most important committee] for forty-two years. The only men to be reelected president —Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson—were all slaveholders. The men who sat in the Speaker’s chair the longest—Henry Clay, Andrew Stevenson, and Nathaniel Macon—were slaveholders. Eighteen out of thirty-one Supreme Court justices were slaveholders.

In all, an engrossing analysis typical of Wills.

was sworn in as Supreme Court Justice on this date in 1967. Marshall made the successful argument before the Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. He was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by President Kennedy, and as Solicitor General and then to the Supreme Court by President Johnson.

Click here to see how political cartoonist Paul Conrad depicted the loss when Marshall died in 1993 (two years after retiring from the Court).

The National Archives opened a new exhibit of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution this recent Constitution Day, September 17. They also opened an extraordinary web presentation of these Charters of Freedom and related documents.

The two former presidents who died on the same day were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. They died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The much disputed Warren Commission Report was issued on this date in 1964. According to the report, the bullets that killed President Kennedy and injured Texas Governor John Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald in three shots from a rifle pointed out of a sixth floor window in the Texas School Book Depository.

The Warren Commission was chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, former Governor of California. It included Senators Richard B. Russell and John Sherman Cooper, House Members Hale Boggs and Gerald R. Ford, and two private citizens with extensive government service, Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy.

Jonathan Chapman was born in Massachusetts on this date in 1774. Chapman earned his nickname “Johnny Appleseed” because he planted orchards and apple trees across 100,000 square miles of wilderness and prairie in the Midwest. According to the Library of Congress, “Each year he traveled hundreds of miles on foot, wearing clothing made from sacks, and carrying a cooking pot which he is said to have worn like a cap. His travels took him through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana.” Chapman died in 1845.

407 years ago today (1596) Spain named Juan de Oñate governor of the colony of New Mexico.

219 years ago today (1784) the nation’s first daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, began publication.

206 years ago today (1777) continental soldiers under General Horatio Gates defeated the British at Saratoga, New York. A second battle was fought at Saratoga on October 17, 1777. American victory in the battles turned the war in the colonists favor and helped persuade the French to recognize American independence and provide military assistance.

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.

“The president generals are George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Dwight Eisenhower. Unlike the other six, who were famed for their battlefield achievements, Pierce, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison were not known for their military records. Generals who have lost general elections include Lewis Cass, Winfield Scott, George McClellan, and Winfield S. Hancock. Douglas MacArthur and Al Haig are among the generals who planned presidential runs but never got close to the November ballot.”

From Slate

“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