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April 6, 1917 - The United States officially enters World War I

“Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally enters World War I.

When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America’s closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the United States and Germany over the latter’s attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines, and in February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a private American vessel. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government apologized and called the attack an unfortunate mistake.

On May 7, the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner was torpedoed without warning just off the coast of Ireland. Of the 1,959 passengers, 1,198 were killed, including 128 Americans. The German government maintained that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, but the U.S. demanded reparations and an end to German attacks on unarmed passenger and merchant ships. In August, Germany pledged to see to the safety of passengers before sinking unarmed vessels, but in November sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. With these attacks, public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.

In 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition against the Allies, announced the resumption of unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters. Three days later, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and just hours after that the American liner Housatonic was sunk by a German U-boat. On February 22, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war. In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2 President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany. Four days later, his request was granted.

On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of bloody stalemate along the western front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces into the conflict marked a major turning point in the war and helped the Allies to victory. When the war finally ended, on November 11, 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives.“

-History.com

This Month in History:
April 3, 1860 - The Pony Express begins
April 9, 1959 - NASA introduces America’s first astronauts
April 12, 1963 - Martin Luther King, Jr. writes "Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
April 20, 1902 - Marie and Pierre Curie isolate radium
April 24, 1800 - Library of Congress established
April 30, 1803 - United States and France conclude the Louisiana Purchase

ThisSelective Service Poster from World War I can be found in the online collection of the McLeod County Historical Society & Museum.

September 1, 1807 - Aaron Burr acquitted of Treason

“Former U.S. vice president Aaron Burr is acquitted of plotting to annex parts of Louisiana and Spanish territory in Mexico to be used toward the establishment of an independent republic. He was acquitted on the grounds that, though he had conspired against the United States, he was not guilty of treason because he had not engaged in an “overt act,” a requirement of the law governing treason. Nevertheless, public opinion condemned him as a traitor, and he fled to Europe.

Aaron Burr, born into a prestigious New Jersey family in 1756, graduated from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) at the age of 17. He joined the Continental Army in 1775 and distinguished himself during the Patriot attack on Quebec. A masterful politician, he was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1783 and later served as state attorney. In 1790, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. In 1796, Burr ran for the vice presidency on Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican ticket (the forerunner of the Democratic Party), but the Federalist John Adams won the presidency. Burr left the Senate and returned to the New York Assembly.

In 1800, Jefferson again chose Burr as his running mate. Under the electoral procedure then prevailing, president and vice president were not voted for distinctly; the candidate who received the most votes was elected president, and the second in line, vice president. Jefferson and Burr each won 73 votes, and the election was sent to the House of Representatives. What at first seemed but an electoral technicality–handing Jefferson victory over his running mate–developed into a major constitutional crisis when Federalists in the lame-duck Congress threw their support behind Burr. After a remarkable 35 tie votes, a small group of Federalists changed sides and voted in Jefferson’s favor.

Burr became vice president, but Jefferson grew apart from him, and he did not support Burr’s renomination to a second term in 1804. That year, a faction of New York Federalists, who had found their fortunes drastically diminished after the ascendance of Jefferson, sought to enlist the disgruntled Burr into their party and elect him governor. Burr’s old political antagonist Alexander Hamilton campaigned against him with great fervor, and he lost the Federalist nomination and then, running as an independent for governor, the election. In the campaign, Burr’s character was savagely attacked by Hamilton and others, and after the election he resolved to restore his reputation by challenging Hamilton to a duel, or an “affair of honor,” as they were known.

Affairs of honor were commonplace in America at the time, and the complex rules governing them usually led to a resolution before any actual firing of weapons. In fact, the outspoken Hamilton had been involved in several affairs of honor in his life, and he had resolved most of them peaceably. No such recourse was found with Burr, however, and on July 11, 1804, the enemies met at 7 a.m. at the dueling grounds near Weehawken, New Jersey.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. According to Hamilton’s “second”—his assistant and witness in the duel—Hamilton decided the duel was morally wrong and deliberately fired into the air. Burr’s second claimed that Hamilton fired at Burr and missed. What happened next is agreed upon: Burr shot Hamilton in the stomach, and the bullet lodged next to his spine. Hamilton was taken back to New York, and he died the next afternoon.

Few affairs of honor actually resulted in deaths, and the nation was outraged by the killing of a man as eminent as Alexander Hamilton. Charged with murder in New York and New Jersey, Burr, still vice president, returned to Washington, D.C., where he finished his term immune from prosecution.

In 1805, Burr, thoroughly discredited, concocted a plot with James Wilkinson, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Army, to seize the Louisiana Territory and establish an independent empire, which Burr, presumably, would lead. He contacted the British government and unsuccessfully pleaded for assistance in the scheme. Later, when border trouble with Spanish Mexico heated up, Burr and Wilkinson conspired to seize territory in Spanish America for the same purpose.

In the fall of 1806, Burr led a group of well-armed colonists toward New Orleans, prompting an immediate U.S. investigation. General Wilkinson, in an effort to save himself, turned against Burr and sent dispatches to Washington accusing Burr of treason. In February 1807, Burr was arrested in Louisiana for treason and sent to Virginia to be tried in a U.S. court. On September 1, he was acquitted on a technicality. Nevertheless, the public condemned him as a traitor, and he went into exile to Europe. He later returned to private life in New York, the murder charges against him forgotten. He died in 1836.”

- History.com

This week in History:

August 29, 1876 - Charles F. Kettering, inventor of the electric self-starter, is born
August 30, 1983 - Guion S. Blueford becomes first African-American to travel to space
August 31, 1897 - Thomas Edison patents the Kinetograph
September 1, 1985 - Wreck of Titanic Found
September 2, 1945 - Japan surrenders, bringing an end to WWII
September 3, 1783 - Treaty of Paris signed
September 4, 1951 - President Truman makes first transcontinental television broadcast

Thisengraving of Aaron Burr can be found in the online collection of the Fraunces Tavern Museum. 

Feb 5, 1919 - United Artists created

“By 1919, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith were all heavyweights in the rapidly growing motion-picture industry. Chaplin was a British actor and former vaudeville performer whose “Little Tramp” persona had made him one of the biggest stars of silent film. Pickford, silent film’s favorite ingenue, and Fairbanks, her leading man on-screen and off, were equally familiar to American audiences, and Griffith’s controversial feature Birth of a Nation (1915) had become Hollywood’s first blockbuster, establishing the director as a pioneer in filmmaking techniques. All four, however, were seeking to gain more financial and artistic control over producing and distributing their films. On February 5, 1919, they joined forces to create their own film studio, which they called the United Artists Corporation.

United Artists quickly gained prestige in Hollywood, thanks to the success of the films of its stars, notably Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), as well as the work of actors such as Buster Keaton, Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson. Chaplin directed UA films as well as acted in them, and Pickford concentrated on producing after she retired from acting in the 1930s. With the rise of sound during that decade, UA was helped by the talents (and bankrolls) of veteran producers like Joseph Schenck, Samuel Goldwyn, Howard Hughes and Alexander Korda. The corporation began to struggle financially in the 1940s, however, and in 1951 the production studio was sold and UA became only a financing and distributing facility.

By the mid-1950s, all of the original partners had sold their shares of the company, but UA had begun to thrive again, releasing such films as The African Queen (1951), High Noon (1952), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment and The Magnificent Seven (both 1960) and West Side Story (1961). In addition, the company was responsible for the James Bond and Pink Panther film franchises. UA went public in 1957 and became a subsidiary of the TransAmerica Corporation a decade later.

UA films garnered a slew of Best Picture Academy Awards over the course of the 1970s, for Midnight Cowboy (1969), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Rocky (1976) and Annie Hall (1977). Soon after that, however, five top executives left the company in a disagreement and formed the Warner Brothers-backed Orion Pictures. UA sustained an even more devastating blow in 1980, when it released the big-budget flop Heaven’s Gate, directed by Michael Cimino. Two years in the making and way over budget, the film earned less than $4 million at the U.S. box office. After that debacle, UA struggled throughout the 1980s. In 1981, MGM bought the company, merging with it in 1983 to become MGM/UA Entertainment. In a highlight of those relatively dark years, UA did release another Best Picture winner, Rain Man, in 1988.

In 1992, the French bank Credit Lyonnais acquired the corporation and changed its name back to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., abandoning the United Artists name altogether. The James Bond and Pink Panther franchises were revived, with varying degrees of success. MGM changed hands and was reorganized repeatedly over the next decade and a half, during which UA was repositioned as a boutique producer of smaller, so-called “art house” films such as Bowling for Columbine (2002), Hotel Rwanda (2005) and Capote (2006). In November of 2006, MGM gave the actor/producer Tom Cruise (star of Rain Man) and his production partner, Paula Wagner, control over the United Artists production slate, announcing the decision as a “reintroduction” of the UA brand in the spirit of its founders. Cruise and Wagner, whose former deal with Paramount Pictures ended amid reported acrimony earlier in 2006, released their first co-production with UA, Lions for Lambs, in 2007.”

- History.com

This week in History:
Feb 2, 1887: First Groundhog Day
Feb 3, 1944: U.S. Troops capture the Marshall Islands
Feb 4, 1913: Rosa Parks is borm
Feb 5, 1917: Immigration Act passed over Wilson’s veto
Feb 6, 1952: Elizabeth II becomes queen
Feb 7, 1964: The Beatles arrive in New York
Feb 8, 1862: Battle of Roanoke Island

This negative of the United Artists Theater in Chicago can be found in the online collection of the Theatre Historical Society of America. 

November 6, 1860 - Abraham Lincoln Elected President

“Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois.

Lincoln, a Kentucky-born lawyer and former Whig representative to Congress, first gained national stature during his campaign against Stephen Douglas of Illinois for a U.S. Senate seat in 1858. The senatorial campaign featured a remarkable series of public encounters on the slavery issue, known as the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Lincoln argued against the spread of slavery, while Douglas maintained that each territory should have the right to decide whether it would become free or slave. Lincoln lost the Senate race, but his campaign brought national attention to the young Republican Party. In 1860, Lincoln won the party’s presidential nomination.

In the November 1860 election, Lincoln again faced Douglas, who represented the Northern faction of a heavily divided Democratic Party, as well as Breckinridge and Bell. The announcement of Lincoln’s victory signaled the secession of the Southern states, which since the beginning of the year had been publicly threatening secession if the Republicans gained the White House.

By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded, and the Confederate States of America had been formally established, with Jefferson Davis as its elected president. One month later, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina. In 1863, as the tide turned against the Confederacy, Lincoln emancipated the slaves and in 1864 won reelection. In April 1865, he was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after the American Civil War effectively ended with the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

For preserving the Union and bringing an end to slavery, and for his unique character and powerful oratory, Lincoln is hailed as one of the greatest American presidents.”

-History.com

This week in history:
Nov 3, 1948 - Newspaper mistakenly declares Dewey president
Nov 4, 1922 - Entrance to King Tut’s tomb discovered
Nov 5, 1605 - King James learns of gunpowder plot
Nov 6, 1861 - Jefferson Davis elected Confederate president
Nov 7, 1916 - Jeannette Rankin becomes first US Congresswoman
Nov 8, 1895 - German scientist discovers X-rays
Nov 9, 1989 - East Germany opens the Berlin Wall

Thispolitical commemorative ribbon depicting President Lincoln can be found in the online collection of Historic Richmondtown.

January 2, 1788 - Georgia enters Union

“Georgia votes to ratify the U.S. Constitution, becoming the fourth state in the modern United States. Named after King George II, Georgia was first settled by Europeans in 1733, when a group of British debtors led by English philanthropist James E. Oglethorpe traveled up the Savannah River and established Georgia’s first permanent settlement–the town of Savannah. In 1742, as part of a larger conflict between Spain and Great Britain, Oglethorpe defeated the Spanish on St. Simons Island in Georgia, effectively ending Spanish claims to the territory of Georgia.

Georgia, rich in export potential, was one of the most prosperous British colonies in America and was thus slower than the other colonies to resent the oppressive acts of the Parliament and King George III. However, by the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Georgian Patriots had organized, and delegates were sent to the Second Continental Congress. During the war, Georgia was heavily divided between Loyalists and Patriots, and the British soon held most of the state. Savannah served as a key British base for their southern war operations, and the grim four-year British occupation won many Georgians over to the Patriot cause. In 1788, Georgia became the first southern state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.”

-History.com

This week in History:
December 30, 1862 - USS Monitor sinks
December 31, 1879 - Edison demonstrates incandescent light
January 1, 1876 - First modern Mummer’s Parade
January 2, 1974 - Nixon signs national speed limit into law
January 3, 1959 - Alaska admitted into Union
January 4, 1965 - LBJ envisions Great Society in State of Union Address
January 5, 1933 - Golden Gate Bridge is born

Thismap of Georgia from 1827 can be found in the online collection of the Columbus Museum.

July 4, 1776 - American colonies declares independence 

“On this day in 1776, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims the independence of a new United States of America from Great Britain and its king. The declaration came 442 days after the first shots of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts and marked an ideological expansion of the conflict that would eventually involve France’s intervention on behalf of the Americans.

The first major American opposition to British policy came in 1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a taxation measure designed to raise revenues for a standing British army in America. Under the banner of “no taxation without representation,” colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the tax. With its enactment in November, most colonists called for a boycott of British goods, and some organized attacks on customhouses and homes of tax collectors.
After months of protest in the colonies, Parliament finally voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766. Most colonists continued to quietly accept British rule until Parliament’s enactment of the Tea Act in 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering British East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny.

In response, militant colonists in Massachusetts organized the “Boston Tea Party,” which saw British tea valued at some £18,000 dumped into Boston Harbor. Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by the colonists, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America and required colonists to quarter British troops.

In response, the colonists called the first Continental Congress to consider united American resistance to the British. With the other colonies watching intently, Massachusetts led the resistance to the British, forming a shadow revolutionary government and establishing militias to resist the increasing British military presence across the colony. In April 1775, Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, ordered British troops to march to Concord, Massachusetts, where a Patriot arsenal was known to be located. On April 19, 1775, the British regulars encountered a group of American militiamen at Lexington, and the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. Initially, both the Americans and the British saw the conflict as a kind of civil war within the British empire. To King George III, it was a colonial rebellion, and to the Americans, it was a struggle for their rights as British citizens. However, Parliament remained unwilling to negotiate with the American rebels and instead hired Hessians, German mercenaries, to help the British army crush the rebellion.

In response to Britain’s continued opposition to reform, the Continental Congress began to pass measures abolishing British authority in the colonies. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, an influential political pamphlet that convincingly argued for American independence and sold more than 500,000 copies in just a few months. In the spring of 1776, support for independence swept the colonies, the Continental Congress called for states to form their own governments and a five-man committee was assigned to draft a declaration. The Declaration of Independence was largely the work of Virginian Thomas Jefferson. In justifying American independence, Jefferson drew generously from the political philosophy of John Locke, an advocate of natural rights, and from the work of other English theorists. The declaration features the immortal lines, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It then goes on to present a long list of grievances that provided the rationale for rebellion. On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted to approve a Virginia motion calling for separation from Britain. The dramatic words of this resolution were added to the closing of the Declaration of Independence.

Two days later, on July 4, the declaration was formally adopted by 12 colonies after minor revision. New York, the 13th colony, approved it on July 19. On August 2, the declaration was signed. The American War for Independence would last for five years. Yet to come were the Patriot triumphs at Saratoga, the bitter winter at Valley Forge, the intervention of the French and the final victory at Yorktown in 1781. In 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris with Britain, the United States formally became a free and independent nation.”

-History.com

This week in History:
July 1, 1867 - Canadian Independence Day
July 2, 1964 - President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act
July 3, 1890 - Idaho becomes 43rd state
July 5, 1921- Chicago White Sox accused of throwing World Series
July 6, 1957 - Althea Gibson becomes first African American to win Wimbledon
July 7, 1930 - Building of Hoover Dam begins

Thispainting of the Reading of the Declaration of Independence can be found in the collection of the Westchester County Historical Society.

This week in History: May 5, 1961: The first American in space

”From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA was established in 1958 to keep U.S. space efforts abreast of recent Soviet achievements, such as the launching of the world’s first artificial satellite–Sputnik 1–in 1957. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers raced to become the first country to put a man in space and return him to Earth. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet space program won the race when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space, put in orbit around the planet, and safely returned to Earth. One month later, Shepard’s suborbital flight restored faith in the U.S. space program.

NASA continued to trail the Soviets closely until the late 1960s and the successes of the Apollo lunar program. In July 1969, the Americans took a giant leap forward with Apollo 11, a three-stage spacecraft that took U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon and returned them to Earth. On February 5, 1971, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, became the fifth astronaut to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission.”

-History.com

This week in History:

April 29, 1854: First African-American college chartered
April 30, 1803: Louisiana Purchase concluded
May 1, 1931: Empire State Building dedicated
May 2, 1933: Loch Ness sighted
May 3, 1946: US Supreme Court decides Paramount antitrust case
May 4, 1776: Rhode Island declares independence
May 5, 1904: Cy Young pitches perfect game

Thisphotograph of Alan Shepard, Jr. (center in silver space suit) and Navy SEALS can be found in the collection of the Navy SEAL Museum’s collection.