Patriotic fervor was high in both the North and South when the Civil War began, as reflected in many of the letters both soldiers and civilians wrote at the beginning of the war. Two weeks after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter began the hostilities, young men on both sides were volunteering to fight, and their communities and families were doing all they could to support them. The following letter, written on April 28, 1861, is from Greensburg, the seat of St. Helena Parish in Louisiana. read more...
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On December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, outlawing slavery. Even with this constitutional protection, however, most freed slaves in the former Confederacy were denied civil and political rights and kept in virtual slavery. To address this, Congress proposed a “Reconstruction” amendment on June 13, 1866, to ensure citizenship for emancipated slaves and guarantee due process of law. read more...
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After 2 years and 17 days of secret, difficult negotiations—during a war that lasted 37 months—an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953, finally halting the fighting in the Korean War. A bloody, destructive proxy war in the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Korean War caused millions of casualties yet the border remained unchanged: the armistice left the two Koreas divided at the 38th parallel, just as they had been when the war began. read more...
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On July 23, 1885, Ulysses S. (“Unconditional Surrender”) Grant, Civil War hero and the nation’s 18th president, died a painful and impoverished death at the age of 63. He spent the last months of his life grappling with the ravages of throat cancer, desperately writing his life’s memoirs so that his family would not be destitute after he was gone. read more...
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He’s a forgotten American hero now, one whose legacy does not shine as brightly as Charles Lindbergh or Amelia Earhart. However, aviation pioneer Wiley Post was every inch the hero when 50,000 excited fans thronged New York’s Floyd Bennett Field on July 22, 1933, to greet Post as he came in for a landing, the first person to fly solo around the world. read more...
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Shortly after the Civil War began with the Confederacy firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Northern politicians, the public, and the press started demanding that the Union army invade Virginia and make a move on Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. The Union responded enthusiastically to President Lincoln’s call for the nation to mobilize, supplying men, arms and equipment, forming a Northern army to suppress the Southern rebellion. read more...
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NewsInHistory.com is continually adding more content to our historical newspaper archive—titles new to our collection as well as expanding the date ranges and number of issues for titles already in our archive. This current addition, our second in July, involves 29 newspapers from 20 states. A total of 12,606 issues have been added in this release! Here are the details:
Alabama
Mobile Register (Mobile). 588 issues: 1980 to 1983
Arkansas read more...
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), founded in 1958, has been America's leading government agency for space exploration and scientific and aeronautics research for 52 years. The highlight of NASA’s history occurred on July 20, 1969, when the Apollo 11 space flight successfully landed the first humans on the moon. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin thrilled Americans and the world with their two-hour walk on the moon’s surface while astronaut Michael Collins piloted the command module orbiting above the lunar explorers. read more...
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The women’s rights movement in America was energized by the National Women’s Rights Convention held in Worcester, Mass., in October 1850. Two years earlier, however, another important meeting of women—and some men—made suffrage a key goal of the women’s rights movement during a two-day convention convened on July 19, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. Over 300 people attended the convention, including famed speaker Lucretia Mott, a Quaker from Boston, and abolitionist Frederic Douglass. read more...
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On July 16, 1945, leaders of the “Big Three” allied countries were in Potsdam, Germany, preparing for the next day’s formal commencement of the Potsdam Conference to decide the fate of post-war Germany and Eastern Europe, as well as the ongoing war with Japan and other troubling issues around the world. The United States was represented by President Harry S. Truman, the United Kingdom by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the Soviet Union by Premier Joseph Stalin. read more...
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I understand that when writing a blog, it’s necessary to show a picture and say a few words about yourself, so that people don’t think a nameless, faceless committee or advisory board is running the show. Here I am, a real person. My name is Tony Pettinato, and I live in Deerfield, Mass. I did my undergraduate studies in English at Oberlin College, my graduate work in Journalism at UC Berkeley, and have been a reporter for six newspapers. For the past twelve years I have worked at NewsBank, the last six as a managing editor for the U.S. Congressional Serial Set project – NewsBank’s acclaimed effort to digitize and index twelve million pages of primary source documents – that gratified my life-long interest in American history. And that has led me to this blog!