[Editor's note: silbey's back for another guest post. Which reminds me, there are only sixteen shopping days until Christmas and thirteen until Hanukkah. Hey, you know what makes a great gift? A beautifully written, deeply researched, and thoughtfully argued book, that's what. Anyway, thanks, silbey, for your efforts.]
On this day in history (Tokyo time), units of the Imperial Japanese Navy mounted an assault on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. English language accounts of the attack, whether scholarly or popular, have focused on the American side of things, usually with a nod to Japanese treachery. But it is the Japanese side that is actually—in military terms—the more interesting. Like the Germans in 1940, the Japanese showed with devastating effect the value of a new method of warfare. The attack on Pearl Harbor rewrote the doctrine on naval warfare, and much of …
Editor’s note: Caleb McDaniel, who many of you (at least those of you familiar with internet traditions) may remember from modeforcaleb, joins us today for a guest post. Thanks, Caleb, for taking the time to do this. We really appreciate it.
A month and a half earlier, Brown had led a band of twenty-two men, including three of his sons, in a daring–and disastrous–raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry in western Virginia, a raid intended as a direct strike on the institution of slavery within the South itself. Captured on October 18 and quickly tried by the state, a wounded Brown spent November in a jail cell in Charlestown, Virginia. Then, on December 2, he was escorted from his jail cell…
[Editor's note: zunguzungu, long-time commenter and friend of the blog, has stepped up with a guest post today. Thanks for this. We really appreciate it.]
Henry Morton Stanley pretended to have written something in his diary on November 23rd, 1871. Perhaps he did, though the pages in his diary are torn out, so we can’t know for sure. The event he claimed to have recorded — but probably didn’t — also probably didn’t happen, or at least not the way it’s usually “remembered.” He most likely didn’t say “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” on meeting the older doctor (Tim Jeal says so in his new biography), and he didn’t even meet him in the jungle at all. He met him in a town, as this image from How I Found Livingstone illustrates:
As Claire Pettitt put it in her excellent Dr Livingstone I Presume?: Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire, it’s a phrase we remember without really …
[Lori Clunereturns for another guest post. Thanks, Lori, for freaking me out.]
On this day in 1950, the Washington Daily News ran a story describing “the crazy attempted assassination” of President Harry S. Truman. On November 1st – while the president took a nap in his underwear on an unseasonably warm autumn afternoon – two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to assassinate Truman in hopes of sparking a Puerto Rican independence movement. Only a locked screen door and security guards stood between Truman and the assassins. Both men, Griselo Torresola and Oscar Collazo, were shot before they could get inside the house. Torresola, suffering a head wound, died instantly. Collazo, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, was saved when Truman commuted his sentence to life. President Carter ordered Collazo’s early…
[Chuck Walker has decided to squander some of his precious time today by posting on the 1746 Lima earthquake. Chuck's extraordinary new book, on the same subject, can be found here. Thanks, Chuck, for agreeing to join us.]
On this day in 1746 a massive earthquake walloped Lima, Peru, the center of Spain’s holdings in South America. Tumbling adobe walls, ornate facades, and roofs smothered hundreds of people and the death toll reached the thousands by the next day. About ten percent of this city of 50,000 died in the catastrophe. The earthquake captured the imagination of the world, inspired Lima’s leaders to try to rethink the city, and unified the city’s population–in opposition to these rebuilding plans. With constant aftershocks and horrific discoveries of the dead and wounded, despair as well as thirst and hunger set in quickly. Life was miserable for a long time. Lime…
[Editor's note: Thanks, as always, to Ben Alpers, for this post. Ben's book can be found here. You'll find that just one copy is never enough. So avoid the rush: buy three today!]
Sixty-one years ago today, on October 20, 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), opened its hearings into alleged Communist infiltration into Hollywood. Out of these hearings came the Hollywood blacklist. They form a useful, if still somewhat arbitrary starting point for the Second Red Scare, which is sometimes mislabeled “McCarthyism” (more on why that’s not my preferred term below).
[Editor's note: Paul Sutter joins us today to talk about his research on the Panama Canal. Paul is one of my favorite colleagues in the profession and an outstanding environmental historian. His first book, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement, is smart, readable, and a great stocking-stuffer. The holidays are just around the corner, people; it's never too early to plan ahead. Thanks, Paul, for doing this.]
On October 10, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson, safely ensconced in the Executive Office Building, pressed a button that remotely trigged a dynamite blast on the Isthmus of Panama, a blast that destroyed the Gamboa Dike and, for the first time, created a continuous liquid passage across Central America. It was a moment that the New York Times called, in language typical of the triumphalism that attended the Panama Canal’s…
[Editor's note: Teo returns today for more calendar blogging. For more of his superb writing, check out his blogs: here and here.]
On this day in 1582, nothing happened in Spain, Portugal, Poland-Lithuania, or most of Italy. It’s not that this was an uneventful time in those places; far from it. This date, however, was right in the middle of the block of days eliminated from the calendar by the papal bull Inter gravissimas, issued a few months earlier, which recalibrated the civil calendar to bring the date of celebration of Easter back in line with where it had been at the time of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 by declaring that the day after October 4 would be October 15. Since the bull was issued by Pope Gregory XIII,the resulting calendar is known as the Gregorian Calendar.
This is the calendar we still use today, of course, but it took a while for that to happen. The…
[We're lucky to have Ben Alpers back with us today. Ben's excellent book can be found here. Thanks again, Ben, for doing this. We're very grateful to you.]
On this day in 1927, The Jazz Singer premiered in New York City. Though usually credited as the first “talkie,” the film’s innovation is subtler than that designation suggests. To begin with, over a year before The Jazz Singer was released, on August 6, 1926, Warner Brothers had released the first feature film with a synchronized soundtrack, Don Juan. Directed by Alan Crosland, who would later direct The Jazz Singer, Don Juan had no dialogue, but merely sound effects and a musical soundtrack. On the other hand, though The Jazz Singer was the first feature film with synchronized dialogue, only a few short scenes feature it. Most of the film, like Don Juan before it, is essentially a silent film with a synced musical…
Please welcome back David Silbey for the exciting conclusion of this epic saga. Many, many thanks, David.
The Germans knew an attack was coming. They could read a map as well as anyone, and the situation in theater was particularly obvious. The St. Mihiel salient had been a problem for the French and Americans, and an American attack had reduced it. What was next? The French Army held the center of the line, near the river Aisne. The terrain here was flat and, once the Aisne was crossed, without natural barriers until an attacking army hit the River Meuse. Just beyond the Meuse lay a tempting target: the German rail junction at Sedan. Capture that, and the network that supplied the German armies in France would be cut in half.
But along the western line of that open terrain lay one forbidding feature: the Argonne Forest. Heavily wooded and on rocky ground, the Argonne was…
The American plan was flawed from the beginning. First, the attacks were spaced too closely together in time. To be successful, offensives in 1918 had to be complex, highly-planned and rehearsed, and heavily supplied. There was plenty of time to plan, supply, and train for the St. Mihiel assault, but not for Meuse-Argonne. American units would have to be pulled out of the St. Mihiel attack, have their casualties replaced, and retrain for the Meuse-Argonne, in the space of about ten days. This was simply not enough time. Second, the attacks were spaced too closely in distance. St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne were next to each other on the front, supplied by the same road network. Even worse, that road network ran through Verdun, the site of near continuous fighting in…
We are pleased and privileged to welcome back David Silbey, who has suspended his campaign so he can provide us a truly outstanding This Day in History. Many, many thanks, David.
On this day in 1918, the United States launched an attack against the German trenches in the Meuse-Argonne region of northern France. It was the largest American effort since the Civil War; in absolute numbers it was the largest operation the United States had ever undertaken.
That which traditionally does not survive contact with the enemy.
For all that, it was a sideshow to the larger war. After the stagnation of 1916-1917, 1918 had become the year of resolution. The Germans, fresh from their victory over the Russians, had transported hundreds of thousands of soldiers back from the eastern front to the western. They knew that they had a limited amount of time to take advantage of the numbers,…
[Editor's Note: Andres Resendez, our correspondent to the frozen wastes of Northern Europe, writes in from Finland today. Which suggests that the blog's reach now encompasses the entire globe. So don't mess with us, people. Anyway, Andres's outstanding new book -- it got an A- from Entertainment Weekly -- can be found here. And we're very grateful to him for taking the time to pitch in. Though really, he's in Finland, so what else does he have to do with his time? It's either this or pick a fight with a Swede. And we all know Andres isn't that kind of guy.]
On this day Mexico celebrates its independence from the Spanish Empire (no, it wasn’t Cinco de Mayo, although the fact that the latter is the better-known date in the United States prompts many interesting questions and a few tentative answers). Miguel Hidalgo y…
[Teo has been running with wolves and stuff. But he's still kind enough to check in and drop some Southwestern flavah on us. This post either is or soon will be cross-posted at one of Teo's two excellent blogs: here or here.]
On this day in 1692, Don Diego de Vargas Zapata Luján Ponce de León, the governor of the Spanish colony of New Mexico, arrived at the town of Santa Fe, formerly the capital of the province but held since 1680 by the coalition of Pueblo Indians who revolted against the Spanish in that year and managed to drive them out of the area entirely. Vargas, an ambitious royal administrator and member of a distinguished family in Madrid, had only recently been appointed governor, but he had spent almost all of his short term so far planning obsessively for the reconquest of his nominal province, limited for practical purposes to the area immediately around the fortress …
[Editor's Note: Our special guest today is Lori Clune. Professor Clune is an instructor in the history department at Fresno State and a graduate student in our program. Thanks, Lori, for doing this. We appreciate it.]
On this day in 1949, just north of Peekskill, New York, Paul Robeson attempted to stage a concert — again. The performance scheduled for August 27th to benefit the Civil Rights Congress had never happened; violence had prevented Robeson from even getting within a mile of the stage. Even though the Westchester County community (just up the road from the Clintons’ current digs in Chappaqua) had enjoyed three previous, peaceful Robeson concerts in as many years, 1949 proved different. Communism, and fear of it, was on the rise. The Cold War — 1949 style — included hydrogen bomb testing, Chinese communists…
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This blog is a blog about history, Yiddishkeit, and the Muppets, neither exclusively nor necessarily in that order. And as William Gibson said about this very blog (no, really), “History can save your ass.” Yiddishkeit and the Muppets are just extras.
is the associate director of the Cornell in Washington program and a senior lecturer at Cornell University. He teaches courses on European history, modern military history, guerrilla war, and the role of popular will in waging war.
is an associate professor of history at UC Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize in 2004, and his new book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, will be published by Harvard University Press in fall 2012.
is a professor of history at UC Davis, and the author of several books on US history including The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction, and Murdering McKinley, among others.
is a professor of history at UC Davis. She is the author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford, 2009); Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (North Carolina, 2002); and Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (North Carolina, 1996).
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