1781: American forces compel General Cornwallis to retire from Jamestown Ford, Virginia, to defensible positions at Yorktown. The end is in sight for British military power in the United States.
1914: Germany declares war on Russia in response to that nations' declaration of war on Austria-Hungary. A couple of pistol shots now turn the wheels that bring World War I into being. Please see entry for 3 August 1914.
1933: The National Recovery Administration (NRA) begins its operations. Businesses working in cooperation with this federal agency will display blue eagle signs, whose motto is, "We Do Our Part." The United States Supreme Court will eventually knock down the NRA; Roosevelt will replace it with the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
1944: General George S. Patton, Jr.'s Third U.S. Army is made operational in France. Prior to D-Day, Patton commanded a fictitious army, part of the deception plans that were integral to Operation OVERLORD's success. Called into France to serve under Omar Bradley, Patton is given command of the Third Army, which is to play a pivotal role in Operation COBRA, the Allied plan to break out of the Normandy beachhead and drive across France and into Nazi Germany. By the end of the Second World War in Europe, Patton's army, known for its rapid, slashing style of mobile warfare, will have killed or captured over a quarter of a million Nazi troops.
1958: There is a public outcry as United States postal rates, which have been the same since 1932, climb from three to four cents per ounce.
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1934: German President von Hindenburg dies. The Chancellor of Germany, one Adolf Hitler, immediately seeks election to that office as well. The National Socialist (Nazi) Party is the strongest political party in Depression-era Germany, and on 19 August a plebiscite gives Hitler the votes needed to assume the presidency. He consolidates both offices into himself as der Fuhrer, the Leader. Democracy's brief experiment in Germany dies, not to be reborn until 1945 when the Nazi empire falls in flames.
1937: President Franklin Roosevelt signs into law the Marijuana Traffic Act, which makes it illegal to possess or sell cannabis saliva. Trafficking in marijuana, except for pharmaceutical compounds prescribed in very limited circumstances, remains illegal throughout the United States today.
1939: Congress passes the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from taking active parts in political campaigns. This is supposed to keep party politics out of governmental offices and prevent the development of the "spoils system." Uh, huh.
1964: Three North Vietnamese patrol boats close on an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, in international waters some thirty miles offshore. It is reported that they have fired torpedoes against the destroyer, but none connect. This one engagement will end the six-month-long covert U.S. naval operations against North Vietnam; now more overt steps will be taken. Please see entry for 5 August 1964.
1990: Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, having trumped up charges that Kuwait has drilled oil on Iraqi territory and rebuffed by Kuwait in his demands for "compensation" (monetary tribute, plus the cession of territory, the reduction of Kuwaiti oil output, and the raising of oil prices to Western nations), orders Iraqi forces to invade Kuwait. Kuwait's military is a fraction of the size of Iraq's, and even though it is better equipped, it cannot stop the Iraqi invasion. The Kuwaiti government is forced to flee and Kuwait comes under armed Iraqi occupation, with devastating consequences for its population. Hussein's aggression is not without a price, however; Washington, London, Tokyo, Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran condemn his attack.
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1914: The Panama Canal opens, the United States completing, at a cost of $367,000,000.00, the work begun in the 1880s by the French (who abandoned the project after losing almost $300,000,000.00 themselves). Thirty thousand workers died in its construction, grim testimony to the efficiency of tropical disease.
1914: Germany declares war on France. The various nations of Europe, tied to one another by treaties of offensive or defensive assistance, and all-round nationalism fuel the growing conflagration. Throughout European capitals, troops mobilize and people rejoice that their warriors will return home, victorious, "before the leaves fall." They will be right. The warriors--those who survive--will return when the leaves fall in November. November, 1918. Please see entry for 4 August 1914.
1981: PATCO--the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization--orders a strike by its members in order to secure a four-day work week and a $10,000.00 annual raise for each member. All but 2,000 of its members walk off their jobs. President Ronald Reagan gives the striking workers until 6 August to return to work, citing federal law that makes it illegal for them to strike. Please see entry for 6 August 1981.
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1927: The Buffalo Peace Bridge opens, linking Canada and the United States.
1914: With the dismissive statement from the German ambassador that "Belgium is but a highway," German troops invade their western neighbor, seeking a quick, easy strike through the heretofore neutral country to overrun the northern plain of France. Britain immediately declares war on Germany.
1945: The Imperial Japanese government rejects the Potsdam Declaration. American B-29's drop leaflets over Hiroshima warning the population, "Your city will be obliterated unless your Government surrenders." The war faction still dominates the Japanese government, however, and cannot be dissuaded from its suicidal defense of the home islands against the expected Allied invasion. Please see entry for 6 August 1945.
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1964: North Vietnamese patrol boats again engage U.S. naval vessels that are operating in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. President Lyndon Johnson orders retaliatory action, and American aircraft bomb North Vietnamese bases. Please see entry for 2 March 1965.
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1945: A B-29 named the Enola Gay after the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets, Jr., arrives early in the morning over Hiroshima, Japan. It carries a single bomb: A weapon ten feet long and weighing 9,000 pounds. This bomb, code-named "Little Boy," is the world's first atomic bomb to be used in combat. Below, citizens and the military in Hiroshima (the city is a command staging area for the Japanese military) take little notice of the single bomber, as American bombers typically send weather surveillance craft over the home islands to plot larger, conventional air raids. The Enola Gay drops the bomb from 32,000 feet and returns to its base on the island of Tinian. Little Boy explodes approximately 1,800 feet above the city with the force of 20 kilotons (forty million pounds) of TNT. The blast kills at least 100,000 Japanese itself, and nearly that many more will eventually die from burns and radiation poisoning. Japan's scientists and the more reasonable members of its government immediately realize the import of such a devastating weapon, but the war faction still will not be dissuaded. Another bomb must be dropped. Please see entry for 9 August 1945.
1981: President Reagan fires all air traffic controllers who have defied his return-to-work order and orders military air traffic controllers to handle civilian ATC work pending hiring and training of new personnel. PATCO, the soon-to-be-decertified air traffic controllers' union, wails and moans but elicits neither public nor Congressional support for its illegal strike. The air disasters its leadership predicts do not occur (one might note in passing that some critics of President Reagan had the same outcome when they predicted nuclear war stemming from his actions). PATCO will be decertified in the autumn and will end up filing in bankruptcy.
1990: Led by the United States, the United Nations Security Council votes 13 to 0 impose economic sanctions on Iraq for its unwarranted invasion of Kuwait. Yemen and Cuba are the sole abstentions. Hussein masses Iraqi military forces on the Saudi Arabian border; in response, the Saudis agree to receive United States ground and air forces.
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1885: President Grover Cleveland issues a proclamation ordering the removal of all barbed wire enclosures on public lands. Barbed wire has been illegal on public land since the preceding February.
1942: Elements of the United States 1st Marine Division come ashore at a heretofore insignificant jungle island in the Solomon chain in the Pacific Ocean. They quickly overpower a detachment of Japanese construction troops and take possession of the partially completed airfield, which they rename Henderson Field after a Marine pilot. For the next four and a half months, the 19,000 Marines commanded by Major-General Vandegrift will endure sporadic supply, nightly bombardment by Japanese cruisers, and repeated, ferocious attacks by troops of the Japanese Seventeenth Army. Many Marines will come out of the fights with that detached, haunted gaze known ever afterward as "the thousand-yard stare." The name of this piece of green hell: Guadalcanal. Please see entry for 9 February 1943.
1964: Congress passes the Tonkin Gulf Resolution by votes of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 416 to 0 in the House of Representatives. This authorizes President Johnson to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." It will be the basis for Johnson's, and later President Richard Nixon's, use of American military force in the Republic of Vietnam and neighboring states. At the war's peak in the late 1960's, more than half a million American servicemen will be in Vietnam.
1990: President Bush orders United States military forces to Saudi Arabia in the beginning of Operation DESERT SHIELD, the defense of Arabian oil from Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi military.
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1925: The Ku Klux Klan celebrates its first ten years of bigotry, cowardice, and mayhem with a march in Washington, D.C. Some 40,000 gallant advocates of racial intolerance bravely march incognito behind their festive, oh-so-fashionable hoods.
1945: The Soviet Union declares war on Japan. According to official Soviet histories, it is this event and no other that compels the Japanese government to surrender.
1990: Saddam Hussein, Iraqi dictator, "annexes" Kuwait and begins its systematic looting.
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1941: President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill meet in secret for three days off the Newfoundland coast. The result of this summit is the Atlantic Charter, specifying agreements between the United States and Great Britain on war aims.
1945: Following the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, American B-29's have been dropping leaflets on the port of Nagasaki, threatening "a rain of ruin the like of which has never been seen on earth." The Japanese government, dominated by die-hards who want to wage a suicidal defense, ignores the warnings. Bock's Car, a B-29 carrying a second atomic bomb, arrives over Nagasaki. This bomb, code-named "Fat Man," has a plutonium core but yields the same destructive force (20 kilotons or 40,000,000 pounds of TNT). Fat Man obliterates most of Nagasaki in a single blast, killing 75,000 or more in its explosion. At least that many more will die from residual effects of the bomb. In two isolated attacks, more than 300,000 Japanese have been killed or mortally wounded. Emperor Hirohito himself overrules the arguing factions and announces that his nation will surrender to spare the Japanese people further attacks. As terrible as these attacks, the only recorded instances of atomic weapons being used in combat, may be, the losses are considerably less than Allied and Japanese planners expected to incur had Operation OLYMPIC, the planned conventional invasion of Japan, been necessary. In later years, revisionists and others of addled brains will ignore that fact and condemn President Truman specifically and the United States generally for having used these weapons. Their criticisms, of course, ignore the fact that for all its supposed "evil," the U.S. military has never otherwise used such devices, even during the years following World War II when the United States had an absolute monopoly on nuclear weapons. Please see entry for 15 August 1945.
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1917: Congress passes the Lever Act which permits the U.S. Food Administration to fix the price of wheat and otherwise establish government control over food and fuel.
1990: Twelve Arab states, including Egypt, Syria, and Morocco, vote to oppose Iraq with military force. Having failed in his bid to muscle his way to the position of pan-Arabic strongman and to present the Western nations with a fait accompli, Saddam Hussein drags out the old xenophobic rhetoric and demands a "holy war" against everyone he doesn't like, whom he denigrates as "Westerners and Zionists."
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1952: Jordanian factions depose mentally ill King Talal, ending his brief reign. His son Hussein will succeed to the throne the next year. At least ten attempts on his life, unnumbered conspiracies to depose him, rivalry with his cousin Saddam in Iraq, troubles with Israel, and all the other joys of being a Middle Eastern ruler will fail to overcome him for almost four decades. Jordan will be one of the wild cards in the Middle Eastern deck, and its relations with the United States will be a continuing factor in the affairs of the region.
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1953: The Soviet Union elevates physicist Andrei Sakharov to full membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. This may in some way be related to the explosion of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, which takes place on the same day. Sakharov will eventually become one of the Soviet Union's best-known dissidents after he speaks out against the hypocrisy and cruelty of the Communist system.
1955: Congress raises the minimum wage from $0.75 to $1.00 per hour.
1960: The United States launches Echo I, the world's first communications satellite.
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1784: The United States Congress, meeting at Annapolis, Maryland, ends its formal meeting which, on 14 January 1784, ratified the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the War of Independence. Great Britain recognizes American independence under this treaty.
1944: The Battle of the Falaise Gap begins as United States forces, breaking out from the Normandy beachhead, sweep south and then east through north-central France, threatening to trap large parts of the German Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies in the Falaise Gap. British forces attacking from the north and northeast are neither as quick nor as successful in gaining ground, and by the time Allied forces meet and close the pocket on 20 August, many of the enemy have escaped. They leave behind 50,000 of their comrades captured and more than 10,000 dead, as well as huge amounts of captured or destroyed armaments, ammunition, and equipment. It will be winter, 1944, before these German armies are ready to engage in any offensive operations: The ill-fated Battle of the Bulge.
1955: The United Steel Workers sign a contract with American Can and Continental Can. This contract contains the first 52-week guaranteed annual wage in American industry.
1961: Communist East German authorities close the border between East and West Germany, physically as well as politically separating the two countries.
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1914: German and French armies clash in the Battle of the Frontiers as German arms clear the Belgian fortifications and press into France. France, long sparked militarily by the doctrine of elan, believes that sheer offensive spirit will carry the day. 250,000 dead French soldiers later, France should have learned the error of its ways -- but it has not. More than ten million soldiers, including over 100,000 Americans, will pay the price for the arrogant assumptions of European politicians. Please see entry for 11 November 1918.
1945: "V-J Day": World War II ends in the Pacific with the surrender of Imperial Japan. Three of the five leading heads of state, who were alive when the war began, have died during its course. Japan and Europe are prostrate and devastated from the war, and it will take many years of American aid under the Marshall Plan to rebuild the shattered nations. Some, lying under Communist Soviet control, will take even longer to recover.
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1969: Over 300,000 people gather at a farm in Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. This vast, four-day-long concert will be seen by many as a massive protest against the Vietnam War, yet in actuality it is precisely what claims to be, a musical concert of heretofore unmatched proportions. The weather does not cooperate, and the local infrastructure is not geared to accommodating so many people, but despite thunderstorms, traffic jams, and shortages of food, water, and medical facilities, it is by and large peaceful and orderly, perhaps in part because of the near-phenomenal quantities of drugs in use. The music includes works by Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Ritchie Havens, the Jefferson Airplane, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, and many others. Though not accurately related to the Vietnam War, coming when it does the concert is a trademark incident in its chronology. An attempt in 1994 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary with another serial concert at Woodstock will meet with critical, practical, and financial failure. One cannot manufacture trademark instances quite so easily.
1943: United States troops, staging from Sitka (which they seized in May), land on Kiska Island in the Aleutians, eliminating the only territorial gain the Japanese made in their disastrous Midway campaign the previous year.
1945: The Japanese people hear the "voice of the Crane," some for the first time in their lives, as the Emperor Hirohito makes a personal announcement over public radio. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have convinced him that the United States will virtually annihilate his nation with atomic weapons unless he ends the war, and so Hirohito takes the step, unheard of in Japan, of the Emperor acting directly instead of through the various military and civilian officials who for generations have carried out his wishes in his name. He announces to a stunned nation that the unthinkable has happened: Japan has surrendered, the first such event in its history. He instructs his people that they must "endure the unendurable." Fifty years later, far too many historians will take the view that Japan, somehow, was the victim and not the instigator of the war with the United States.
1961: Communist authorities in East Germany erect the Berlin Wall in a 72-hour span, shutting off all movement between the Communist and free halves of the city. The impetus for this hasty construction and for sealing the rest of the national border two days before is a communique from the Warsaw Pact (the Eastern European nations controlled by the Soviet Union) demanding a halt to the mass exodus from East Germany. The Wall will stand, a grim barricade guarded by armed sentries, attack dogs, automatic weapons, searchlights, barbed wire, and land mines, until 1989. Dozens will lose their lives trying to escape Communist territory over, under, or around it.
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1780: General Horatio Gates, leading over 3,000 American troops, meets and attacks a smaller British force under General Cornwallis at Camden, South Carolina. The American troops press home their attack, but British infantry and cavalry outflank and surround them. It is a disastrous defeat for Gates; few of his men escape. The way is clear for Cornwallis to proceed to Raleigh, North Carolina.
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1940: Berlin announces a blockade of Great Britain as the Sitzkrieg, the so-called "Phony War," continues to heat up. The blockade, which will be conducted principally by German submarines (U-Boats), poses the same problems for Germany that it did in World War I; the North Atlantic is a very large body of water, and the doctrine of unrestricted submarine warfare (of halting or sinking all vessels, including neutral ones, without warning) carries a severe risk of provoking the largest neutral power, the United States, to take sides with England. American neutrality will initially limit Britain to the "cash and carry" system to obtain aid, but before long President Franklin Roosevelt will obtain Congressional approval for the Lend-Lease system, which permits Britain to "borrow" materiel on the fictional premise that it will return the guns, ammunition, tanks, aircraft, etc., when its war with Germany ends.
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1990: Saddam Hussein makes the more than 10,000 foreigners inside Iraq hostage. This gambit, quickly seen for what it is, garners no popular support outside his own rigidly controlled dictatorship, and on 29 August he will attempt to save face by allowing women and children to leave. He will release the rest of the hostages in December. The Allied buildup continues in Saudi Arabia as the Western nations, preparing for the failure of economic sanctions to persuade Iraq to depart from Kuwait, strengthen their own defenses and plan for an eventual military offensive.
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1945: United States gasoline and fuel oil rationing ends.
1953: Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi gains control of Iran in a coup. Pro-Western, he will remain in power and have close ties to the United States until 1978, when another coup, engineered by the unstable Ayatollah Khomeini, topples him. President Jimmy Carter's decision to permit the ousted Shah to enter the United States for cancer treatments in 1979 will lead to Iranian seizure of the American Embassy in Teheran and the taking of many American hostages. This incident, and Carter's seeming inability to resolve it, will be one of many factors in his unsuccessful bid for reelection.
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1794: General Anthony Wayne and U.S. Army troops engage and defeat American Indian tribesmen at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Their victory over the Indians, who were encouraged by British provocateurs to attack white settlers, eliminates the Indian menace in the Ohio and Kentucky regions.
1916: An act of Congress creates the U.S. National Park Service in the Department of the Interior. Originally formed to manage forty national parks and monuments, today it is responsible for almost 400 sites covering more than 80,000,000 acres.
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1935: Benny Goodman debuts at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, California, initiating what will be known as the "big band" genre of American jazz. He is very popular, and critics acclaim him as "the king of swing."
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1851: The United States schooner America defeats seven British schooners and eight cutters in a sailing race around the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. She will return home having won the Royal Yacht Squadron Cup, and in the succeeding century the renamed America's Cup becomes the most coveted trophy in world racing. All attempts by Britain, Australia, France, Canada, and other sailing nations to wrest the Cup from the United States fail until 1983, when an Australian team wins the race (some say as a result of ineptitude by the captain of the American racers). American sailing honor is restored as the United States regains the Cup in the next competition in 1987. When Queen Victoria sees the America leaping for the finish line with no competitors in sight and inquires as to the other ships' whereabouts, one of her ministers replies, "Your Majesty, there is no other ship!"
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1914: Japan declares war on Germany. It will declare war on Austria-Hungary two days later. In one of the great ironies of history--and to the detriment of the United States almost thirty years later--Japan will be an avid and helpful Allied power in World War I, manufacturing arms and munitions for the powers fighting the Kaiser. Yet its exposure to German military doctrine will impress many Japanese officers, who will pattern their mid-century army after the Wehrmacht in many ways, and will spur their government to join the Axis in World War II.
1927: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed in the electric chair in Dedham Prison, Massachusetts, convicted in 1921 for the 1920 murder of a factory guard and paymaster at the South Braintree Shoe Factory. Their executions end a seven-year legal fight but by no means subdue the bitter controversy between their advocates and their detractors. The pair will become a cause celebre for criminal defense reformers, social activists, and others of the liberal bent, who will harp that the authorities refused to consider new evidence, and that the two were convicted and executed because they were members of a powerless social class. Their argument will conveniently avoid noting certain truths, among them that Sacco and Vanzetti openly admitted membership in an anarchist movement, and that the "new evidence" was the "confession" of yet another anarchist, who was already awaiting death for his own misdeeds. In 1982, the last surviving member of their defense committee will admit that everyone knew Sacco was guilty of the murder. While Vanzetti may not have participated in the shooting itself, he was involved in the underlying crime. Further, the anarchists adopted their own code of silence; Sacco refused to exonerate Vanzetti because to do so would betray the anarchist movement, while Vanzetti refused to save himself for the same reason. The lesson to be learned: Radicals are both callous of others' lives and not very bright.
1977: The governor of Massachusetts declares this date "Sacco and Vanzetti Day." In this inspired act of liberal "sensitivity" and "caring," he conveniently fails--some say refuses--to take a stand on their guilt or innocence. Eight years later, this gentleman will make an abysmally unsuccessful attempt to be elected President against incumbent Ronald Reagan. His policies of releasing violent criminals, his promises to raise Americans' taxes, and his complete lack of a foreign policy, not to mention allegations of improprieties in his running mate's husband's business, play some small part in his cataclysmic defeat. But, he does look good in a tanker's helmet in his commercials.
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1970: Students at the University of Wisconsin, protesting the university's involvement in military research, blow up a laboratory on campus. The explosion kills one student, wounds four others, and destroys more than $1,500,000.00 of property. All in the name of peace. Right.
1978: Nicaraguan Communist rebels, who two days previously seized the National Palace at Managua in an effort to oust Anastasia Somoza, release all but eight of their hostages in exchange for $71,000.00 in cash, safe passage to Panama, and the release of some political prisoners held by the Somoza regime. They call themselves "Sandinistas" after a 1934 Nicaraguan guerrilla.
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1776: British General Howe, commanding 32,000 regulars, lands on Long Island, planning to capture New York City. He has staged this amphibious operation rather than a direct attack on the city because he wishes to seize New York intact and use it as winter quarters for his troops. George Washington commands a contingent of only 13,000 men of the Continental Army and revolutionary militia. Howe outflanks the American position at Brooklyn Heights but, fearing another Bunker Hill, decides against an all-out attack and opts instead to besiege Washington with help from the British fleet. A northwest wind will prevent the British ships from operating in the East River, however, and Washington will be able to evacuate his army at the end of the month.
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1914: German general Paul von Hindenburg, ably assisted by his chief of staff General Erich Ludendorff, initiate the Battle of Tannenberg, striking the Russian Second Army as it meanders purposelessly in a marshy, wooded region of East Prussia. Over the next four days the Germans' tactical prowess will isolate and crush the Russian army under General Aleksandr Samsonov, killing or capturing over 100,000 Russian soldiers. The victory will also cause the Russian First Army under Rennenkampf to flee precipitately. This, the first and only serious Russian offensive of World War I, ends in a rout for the Russians, who had attacked into East Prussia in the hope of easing pressure on the beleaguered French. Rennenkampf will be executed in 1918. Ironically, the Russian defeat is also a success. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, concerned earlier about the Russian pressure, successfully appealed for troops from the Western Front. Those troops, who arrive too late to affect the Battle of Tannenberg, cannot be returned to the West in time to spearhead the final drive on Paris, and the Western Front will degenerate into years of bloody trench warfare that ultimately saps and defeats the German army.
1920: Tennessee ratifies the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote. Women voters play a significant role in electing Warren G. Harding President.
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1918: American servicemen returning from France bring with them the "Spanish" influenza, a highly virulent influenza that is the worst pandemic to afflict the world since the Black Death of the Middle Ages. The virus first appears in two sailors in Boston. Please see entry for 31 August 1918.
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1867: Captain William Reynolds of the U.S.S. Lackawanna, claims Midway Island as an American territory. The island will figure prominently in World War II (please see entry for 4 June, 1942).
1945: United States military forces land in Japan to begin its post-war occupation. General Douglas MacArthur is named supreme commander of the Allied occupation forces. His administration will give at least one writer cause to nickname him, "American Caesar."
1963: More than 200,000 Americans of all races stage a "march on Washington" to call attention to issues of civil rights.
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1862: The Second Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) pits the Union Army of the Potomac under General Pope against the rebel Army of Northern Virginia commanded by General Lee. This battle, fought on the same battlefield as the first major engagement of the American Civil War, ends as the first one did, with a Confederate victory and a demoralized Union army in disorganized retreat. Lee will--as he does throughout the Civil War, until denied any freedom of motion by Grant's tactics--attempt to carry the war to northern states in an effort to use a tactical military victory to secure a strategic political one. The campaign will end at Antietam in Maryland, where both armies (the Union now commanded by General McClellan) will suffer the single bloodiest day of the entire Civil War. Lee's withdrawal from Antietam will give President Abraham Lincoln enough of a victory to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which will change the nature of the Civil War, in the eyes of many around the world, from a political dispute to a fight to free people held in slavery, ultimately denying the rebels their wished-for air of legitimacy and costing them any realistic chance of foreign support.
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1951: The United States and the Philippines sign a mutual defense treaty, the first of many such treaties aimed at countering Communist aggression in the Pacific.
1954: Amendments to the McMahon Atomic Energy Act of 1948 permit American private industry to participate in the production of nuclear power.
1963: The "hot line" communications link between the United States and the Soviet Union goes into operation. Its purpose is to reduce the risk of unintentional nuclear exchanges. In 1978, the link will be upgraded from cable to satellite.
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1918: Just four days after the first two cases of "Spanish" influenza appear in U.S. sailors returning from World War I, 108 cases of the virus have been reported. By mid-September the disease will have exploded along the Eastern seaboard. One quarter of America's population will fall ill and over 500,000 will die, 19,000 in New York City alone. In some cities, for example Baltimore and Washington, D.C., the disease will be so devastating that supplies of coffins will be exhausted. World War I has claimed 10,000,000 lives; the worldwide epidemic of this influenza will kill more than twice as many people.
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