With the obvious exception of the Civil War, the Vietnam War was the most divisive war in America’s history. As the war dragged on year after year casualties kept mounting, television brought the horrors of combat into living rooms, and stories of atrocities circulated. More and more Americans took to the streets to protest the war. For many people, everything about the war was hateful—including the soldiers fighting it. Returning veterans were bewildered, hurt and angry by their reception back home, with taunting demonstrators calling them “baby killers" and other derogatory terms. read more...
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On Nov. 12, 1912, a search party on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica found the frozen bodies of Captain Robert F. Scott and two companions, eight months after the men perished on a return trip from planting England’s flag at the South Pole. read more...
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Major League Baseball was in trouble in 1920, and the 16 team owners knew it. Although they were accustomed to acting with impunity, the owners realized the public was losing faith in the integrity of their sport—something had to be done, and quickly. Even as the 1919 World Series was being played, rumors circulated that the series was fixed. Those rumors were confirmed on Sept. read more...
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After Congress passed a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act on Sept. 18, 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850, Northern newspapers began running stories of fugitives captured under the new law. An unusual case involving a seemingly white mother, daughter and grandchild occurred in Indiana, as reported by the local paper. The story was published by the New Albany Ledger on November 12 and reprinted by the Public Ledger (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) on November 20, 1850: read more...
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In the summer of 1831, Southern slave owners’ worst fears came true when Nat Turner led a rebellion of his fellow slaves, with the goal of killing as many whites as they could regardless of sex or age. The uprising began Aug. 21, 1831, and over the next 36 hours Turner led about 70 followers on a bloody rampage. Using mainly knives, hatchets and axes, they killed 55 people—31 of them infants and children—in Southampton County, Virginia, before being stopped by the militia. Turner managed to elude capture until October 30 when he was caught hiding in a cave. read more...
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No one called it World War I at the time—for it did not seem possible there could ever be a second. Instead, they called it the “Great War” or the “War to End All Wars.” In a little over four years of combat, more than 70 million soldiers were mobilized around the world and over 9 million were slaughtered. Finally, German officials signed an armistice in November 1918, and on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the ceasefire began and hostilities ended. read more...
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There are many horrors in a war such as the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 soldiers, wounded over 400,000 more, and caused an unknown number of civilian casualties. However, many historians think the war’s greatest horror was what happened to Union soldiers held at Andersonville (Camp Sumter), the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Macon County, Georgia, where nearly 13,000 prisoners died gruesome deaths from starvation, disease and mistreatment. On Nov. read more...
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A furious, deadly storm struck the Great Lakes for four days on Nov. 7-10, 1913. The storm peaked on November 9, with blinding snow, hurricane-force winds over 70 m.p.h., and killer waves up to 35 feet high. No one was expecting the storm to be that intense, and many cargo ships were caught unprotected on the lakes’ open waters. By the time the tempest finally moved east, 12 ships were sunk and another 30 stranded—7 of those destroyed in the process—and more than 250 sailors were dead. read more...
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It stood for 28 years, as grim and ugly a symbol of Cold War tensions as any object on the planet: the Berlin Wall. Then, with a dizzying speed that must have made the heads of technocrats in the Soviet Union and East Germany spin, the forbidding barrier was suddenly opened on Nov. 9, 1989. A stifling age of repression and control was over, and East and West Berliners streamed together to laugh, cry, pop champagne bottles and dance atop the hated—but no longer feared—Berlin Wall. read more...
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On Nov. 9, 1906, Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to leave the country while holding office, when he and his wife traveled to Panama to inspect construction of the Panama Canal. It was no coincidence that Panama was chosen for the honor of this first presidential trip overseas. Roosevelt was president in November 1903 when the U.S. sent warships to prevent Colombia from putting down a rebellion in its Panama territory. The U.S. 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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