It is sometimes said that the publication of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas on Dec. 19, 1843, invented our modern celebration of Christmas. This is an exaggeration, but there is no denying that Dickens’s enduring Christmas tale has had great influence on Christmas as we know it today. His story was an instant critical success in 1843 and has remained popular ever since, having never gone out of print. read more...
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The five-day Battle of Fredericksburg ended Dec. 15, 1862, a crushing defeat for the Union army and a dismal end to a year that had begun so brightly for the North. Despite having superior numbers and far better equipment and supplies, the Union army had once again been defeated in Virginia by Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his smaller yet determined army. When word reached the North that Union General Ambrose E. read more...
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It was a cold, windy day on Dec. 17, 1903, when five people on the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., witnessed Orville and Wilbur Wright make aviation history: the first successful flight of a powered aircraft with fixed wings—the first real airplane. The brothers each made two flights that day, with Wilbur’s final flight the most successful, covering 852 feet and lasting 59 seconds. It is not much by today’s standards, but in 1903 it represented a historic first. read more...
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They said it could not be done, and the official history of the island prison says it never was done: no one ever escaped from Alcatraz Island during the 29 years (1934-63) it was a federal penitentiary. It was not just the lookout towers, the armed guards with orders to shoot to kill, the high walls, iron bars, or steep cliffs that dropped straight into San Francisco Bay. No, what made Alcatraz “escape-proof” was the bay itself: cold, choppy water with strong currents and rip-tides that made the 1.5-mile swim to the shore impossible. read more...
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Early settlers in the north of present-day Alabama dreamed of statehood, but the lack of a coastline hindered development efforts and kept the area’s population small. Then, during the War of 1812, the U.S. annexed the Mobile District from an unresisting Spain and suddenly the area had access to the sea. The other problem the settlers encountered—resistance by the Native Americans in the area, especially the Creeks—was solved by Andrew Jackson, who won the Creek War. The treaty of Fort Jackson, which ended that war on Aug. read more...
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President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, outlawing discrimination and protecting the civil rights of minorities. It did not take long for bigots to challenge the law. A restaurant owner in Alabama and a motel owner in Georgia fought their cases all the way to the highest court in the land, insisting they did not have to serve or accommodate African American customers. The Supreme Court heard the case (Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc. v. U.S.) on October 5. It issued its historic decision on Dec. read more...
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The five-day Battle of Fredericksburg climaxed on Dec. 13, 1862, when the Union Army of the Potomac made 14 heroic and futile charges uphill against General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which was solidly entrenched on the heights just west of the Virginia city. This battle cost the Union 12,653 casualties as opposed to 5,377 for the Confederates, and proved that President Lincoln’s newly-appointed commander, General Ambrose E. Burnside, was no match for Lee. read more...
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Joseph Hayne Rainey was the first African American ever elected to Congress, winning the 1870 election to represent the First District of South Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives. (Hiram Rhodes Revels has the honor of being the first African American to serve in Congress, having joined the U.S. Senate on Feb. 25, 1870—but he was appointed by the Mississippi State Senate to finish a term, not directly elected to his seat as Rainey was.) When Rainey was sworn in on Dec. 12, 1870, newspapers across the country had a range of reactions: some laudatory, some sarcastic and racist. read more...
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The Civil War spurred many innovations in military technology and several notable “firsts” were achieved—one of the most significant being history’s first clash of ironclad warships, when the U.S.S. Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginia (a.k.a. Merrimac) fought on March 9, 1862, in the Battle of Hampton Roads. Later that same year, an ironclad warship experienced another first in military history when the U.S.S. Cairo was sunk by an electronic mine in the Yazoo River on Dec. read more...
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Indiana became the 19th state when it was admitted into the Union on Dec. 11, 1816. The official resolution granting it statehood was published by the National Advocate (New York, New York) on Dec. 20, 1816: 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 fourteen years I have worked at NewsBank, six of those as a managing editor for the U.S. Congressional Serial Set project – NewsBank’s acclaimed effort that digitized and indexed twelve million pages of primary source documents – that gratified my lifelong interest in American history. And that led me to editing this history blog!
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