A painter named Louis Béroud walked into the Salon Carré of the Louvre to sketch the Mona Lisa on Tuesday morning, August 22, 1911. But when he arrived at her usual place, Louis found four iron pegs and a blank wall where the painting should have been.

Louis asked a guard. The man assumed the painting had gone to the museum’s photography studio. Hours passed before anyone understood that the most famous museum in the world had lost a Leonardo da Vinci painting. And that it had been gone since the day before.

Stealing the Mona Lisa had been perceived as impossible. France’s national museums Director had reportedly dismissed the very idea: “You might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the cathedral of Notre Dame,” he had said.

But the painting was gone.

The thief, though no one would know it for more than two years, was Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter and glazier from a village in the north, near the Swiss border. He was known for being quick to anger at any insult to himself or to Italy, which he absorbed plenty of both. His own brothers considered him a madman. His French coworkers, as he later testified, “almost always called me ‘mangia maccheroni’” — macaroni eater — and stole his belongings and salted his wine.

Vincenzo knew the Louvre from the inside. In 1910, after a threatening letter reached the museum, officials hired a glazier firm to fit protective glass over a dozen of its prized paintings. Vincenzo was one of the workmen sent to do it, including on the case that held the Mona Lisa itself. He knew the painting to be small and light enough for one man to carry.

And so, on Monday, August 21, when the Louvre was closed to the public, Vincenzo entered in the white smock of a workman, lifted the Mona Lisa from the wall, stripped away its frame and glass case in a service stairwell, wrapped the panel, and walked out.

The theft made headlines across Europe and beyond, becoming somewhat of a national emergency in France. Borders were watched, and ships and trains were searched. The police questioned the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who spent several days in jail, and brought in a young Pablo Picasso; both were released, having had nothing to do with the crime.

When the Louvre reopened at the end of August, Parisians lined up to see the empty wall. The newspaper Le Figaro called the blank space “an enormous, horrific, gaping void.” Visitors left flowers. Among those who came to look at where the painting had been was a young writer from Prague named Franz Kafka.

The painting, all the while, was hidden in a trunk in Vincenzo’s Paris lodging, not far from the museum. It stayed there for more than two years.

Then, in late November 1913, a Florence antiques dealer named Alfredo Geri opened a letter postmarked Paris and signed “Leonardo.” It read, in part: “The stolen work of Leonardo da Vinci is in my possession. It seems to belong to Italy since its painter was an Italian. My dream is to give back this masterpiece to the land from which it came.”

Geri brought the letter to Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi Museum. On Poggi’s advice, Geri wrote back, expressing interest and asking to see the painting in Florence. In December, Vincenzo brought it there by train and, in his hotel room, produced it from a false-bottomed trunk. Poggi examined the panel and confirmed it.

Vincenzo was arrested at the hotel, still expecting to be rewarded.

At trial in Florence, Vincenzo held to his stance that he had acted for Italy, believing the painting had been plundered by Napoleon. He was mistaken. Leonardo had brought the portrait to France himself, near the end of his life, and it had entered the French royal collection lawfully after being sold to the King by da Vinci’s will executor, centuries before Napoleon was born.

But the story moved his countrymen. The court gave him a sentence of just over a year, reduced to seven months, and much of the Italian press treated him as a misguided patriot rather than a criminal. The painting toured Italy under guard, drawing enormous crowds in Florence, Rome, and Milan, before returning to the Louvre in January 1914. In the first two days after it was rehung, more than 100,000 people came to see it.

Before the theft, the Mona Lisa was a treasure known mainly to those in the art world. Baedeker’s guidebook, the standard tourist’s companion of the day to Paris, gave it two sentences — less than the museum’s other gems. During the twenty-eight months the Mona Lisa was missing, the headlines, the manhunt, and the wall people lined up to see made the painting something else. Its life as the most famous painting in the world arguably began while it could not be seen at all.

Sources:

* Hales, Dianne. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2014.

* Rosenberg, Jennifer. “The Theft of the Mona Lisa.” ThoughtCo, www.thoughtco.com/mona-lisa-stolen-1779626.

* “The Curious Story of the Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa.” Guinness World Records, May 2023, www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2023/5/the-curious-story-of-the-man-who-stole-the-mona-lisa-749918.

* “The Mona Lisa Mystery: Theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.” Secrets of the Dead, PBS/WNET, www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/mona-lisa-mystery-theft-mona-lisa-louvre/1769/. Accessed 7 July 2026.

* “The Theft That Made the ‘Mona Lisa’ a Masterpiece.” NPR, All Things Considered, 30 July 2011, www.npr.org/2011/07/30/138800110/the-theft-that-made-the-mona-lisa-a-masterpiece.

* Wexler, Ellen. "Andrew Lloyd Webber Says He's Writing a New Musical About the Time the 'Mona Lisa' Vanished Without a Trace in 1911." Smithsonian Magazine, 17 Apr. 2026, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/andrew-lloyd-webber-says-hes-writing-a-new-musical-about-the-time-the-mona-lisa-vanished-without-a-trace-in-1911-180988559/.

* Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vincenzo_peruggia.jpg & https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa.jpg

* Zug, James. “Stolen: How the Mona Lisa Became the World’s Most Famous Painting.” Smithsonian Magazine, 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/stolen-how-the-mona-lisa-became-the-worlds-most-famous-painting-16406234/.

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March 5, 1770, was a bitterly cold evening in Boston, Massachusetts. A heavy snowstorm had left the narrow streets cloaked in a foot of snow. It was not a night for lingering outdoors. But just after nine o’clock, a bell shattered the stillness, clanging the alarm for a fire in the city, which was no small matter. Within moments, townspeople hurried from their homes, spilling into the icy streets.

Now, this would not have made the night memorable in history. But some residents went to the Customs House, a government building where British officials managed taxes, duties, and trade regulations. What motivated them isn’t clear. Maybe they went because a British soldier had a dispute with some local workers near the Customs House earlier in the day. Or maybe the group was looking for conflict, as tensions between the colonists and the British government had been simmering for years. Unfair taxes were one major gripe. Another came after the British government sent two thousand troops to Boston in 1768, a significant number given that the town was home to only about sixteen thousand people then. Whatever the reason, the colonists went to the Customs House that night, where one guard and eight soldiers stood in defense.

The colonists began yelling and cursing at the soldiers, throwing snowballs, ice, and oyster shells. “Kill them! Kill them!” people yelled. Someone hit a soldier with a club. Then, shots rang out, and colonists fell to the ground. When the smoke cleared, five lay dead or dying in the snow. The night would be remembered as the Boston Massacre.

The next day, Boston was in an uproar. Calls for justice filled the air as people wanted the soldiers put on trial. But when it came time to find them legal representation, no one wanted the job. To defend the soldiers risked being seen as a traitor to the colonial cause. And people believed that the soldiers would be found guilty in an American court.

Then, John Adams was asked. The future founding father and U.S. President was a respected lawyer and a vocal critic of British policies at the time. Taking the position would be a significant risk with all the fury against the British. Yet, Adams believed in the importance of law, writing,

“I had no hesitation in answering that Council ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want in a free Country … And that Persons whose Lives were at Stake ought to have the Council they preferred … and that every Lawyer must hold himself responsible not only to his Country, but to the highest and most infallible of all Trybunals for the Part he should Act.”

Though the quote can be confusing given some differences in language from then to now, his argument was that legal representation is an essential right in a free country. So amidst everything, Adams took the case.

The first trial was against the captain of the eight men. It started on October 24, 1770, and would be the first trial in the history of the American colonies to go longer than one day. The second trial would be against the eight soldiers and follow shortly after.

Adams began with an appeal to the jury,

“It has become my duty, it shall therefore be my endeavor, to acquit myself in the course of this trial with decency and candour; reflecting that however interesting the question may be, the object of our enquiry is simply that of truth, and that this enquiry is to be conducted by the wisdom of the laws and constitution.”

In his closing argument, Adams urged the jury to set aside their passions and focus on the facts,

“I will enlarge no more on the evidence, but submit it to you.—Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence: nor is the law less stable than the fact; if an assault was made to endanger their lives, the law is clear, they had a right to kill in their own defence; if it was not so severe as to endanger their lives, yet if they were assaulted at all, struck and abused by blows of any sort, by snowballs, oyster-shells, cinders, clubs, or sticks of any kind; this was a provocation, for which the law reduces the offence of killing, down to manslaughter, in consideration of those passions in our nature, which cannot be eradicated. To your candour and justice I submit the prisoners and their cause.”

After days of testimony and deliberation, the jury acquitted the captain and six of the soldiers. Two soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter, but their punishment was light: they were branded on the thumb with a large “M.” It was a surprising outcome but one that, ironically, would earn Adams much respect.

Reflecting on the trial years later, Adams wrote,

“The Part I took in Defence of Captn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy [strong public criticism] enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right.”

Sources:

* “1773. March 5th. Fryday. [from the Diary of John Adams].” National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-02-02-0003-0002-0002

* “Boston Massacre Site.” The Freedom Trail, https://www.thefreedomtrail.org/trail-sites/boston-massacre-site

* “Boston Massacre Trial.” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/boston-massacre-trial.htm

* McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001.

* “John Adams.” National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, https://www.si.edu/es/object/john-adams%3Anpg_NPG.71.4

* Reid, John Phillip. “A Lawyer Acquitted: John Adams and the Boston Massacre Trials.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 18, no. 3, 1974, pp. 189–207. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/845085. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.

* “Thomas Gage.” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/thomas-gage

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In the first decades of American thoroughbred racing, black jockeys were among the masters of the sport. They rode the best horses, won the richest races, and helped make racing one of the great spectacles of nineteenth-century America. And among them, none stood higher than Isaac Burns Murphy.

Many consider Isaac the greatest American jockey who ever lived. By the official record, he won 530 of his 1,538 races, a rate of about thirty-four percent. By his count, it was higher — 628 wins in 1,412 starts, nearly forty-four percent. The chart books of his era are incomplete, and some of his races may never have been entered in them. Either way, whichever figure one takes, no jockey has matched it. His victories included the Kentucky Derby three times, the Latonia Derby five times, and four of the first five runnings of the American Derby.

Isaac was born in Kentucky’s Bluegrass country on New Year’s Day, 1861. His father, a formerly enslaved man, served in the Union Army and died before the war was over, when Isaac was still a small child.

In those early years, Isaac grew up near Lexington, among the barns and horses and trainers and grooms of one of America’s great racing regions. The stable became his school. He learned the sounds and habits of horses, the language of the track, the discipline of the saddle. As a boy, he became an exercise rider. At fourteen, weighing less than ninety-five pounds, he was given his first mount, a replacement ride at Churchill Downs.

He finished last.

Isaac’s first national notice came in 1879, when he was eighteen. At Saratoga, aboard a horse named Falsetto, Isaac won the Travers Stakes, beating the Belmont winner Spendthrift and the celebrated jockey Edward Feakes. Afterward, the Spirit of the Times wrote that Isaac “is one of the best jockeys in America. He is very observant during the progress of a race, keeps a sharp lookout for danger, is quick to perceive the weak points of an adversary, and prompt to take advantage of them. He has a steady hand, a quick eye, a cool head, and a bold heart.”

There was another part of his reputation, though, and on the nineteenth-century turf it counted nearly as much as winning.

He was honest.

Race-fixing was common in those years—bettors paid jockeys to “pull” a horse and lose—but Isaac refused. The same year, aboard the same horse, gamblers pressed him to throw the Kenner Stakes; he won it instead. To many, he was simply “Honest Isaac.” The trainer L.P. Tarlton later recalled that so few doubted his integrity that almost no one dared approach him, and that at the faintest suspicion of a fixed race, he would hand back the colors and refuse to ride.

All of Isaac’s success made him rich. At his height, Isaac earned as much as ten to twenty thousand dollars a year, owned thoroughbreds of his own and a fine house in Lexington, and stood among the highest-paid athletes in the country. He was also one of its most famous.

Yet he left little in his own words. He was literate but wrote almost nothing about himself and spoke sparingly of his victories, so the record holds what he did far better than what it cost him. And the latter was a lot. Beyond the struggles with racism, the profession exacted its own toll. To make weight, jockeys starved and sweated themselves down, year after year, and the strain left them poorly defended against illness. Isaac’s health failed while he was still a young man. He died of pneumonia in Lexington on February 12, 1896, at thirty-five.

For a time, the man many had called the finest rider in America slipped from memory. His grave fell into neglect, and its location was lost. Years passed before anyone tracked it down. In 1967, his remains were reinterred beside Man o' War; when the Kentucky Horse Park opened in 1978, the two were moved there together, where Isaac rests today beside one of the greatest horses in racing history.

Sources:

* Bolus, Jim. "Honest Isaac's Legacy: The Greatest U.S. Jockey of the 19th Century Was a Black Man, Isaac Murphy." Sports Illustrated, vol. 84, no. 17, 29 Apr. 1996.

* Isaac Murphy, head-and-shoulders portrait, in jockey uniform, facing left. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2005690025/

* “Isaac B. Murphy.” National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, https://www.racingmuseum.org/hall-of-fame/jockey/isaac-b-murphy

* “Isaac Burns Murphy.” Kentucky Horse Park, https://kyhorsepark.com/explore/isaac-burns-murphy/

* MURRAY, ROBERT P., and Pellom Mc-Daniels. The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, vol. 113, no. 1, 2015, pp. 93–96. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24641247. Accessed 28 Jun. 2026.

* Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IsaacMurphy.jpg

* Yang, Avery. "Black History Month: Isaac Murphy Became One of the Best Jockeys in History." Sports Illustrated, 25 Feb. 2020, www.si.com/horse-racing/2020/02/25/black-history-month-isaac-murphy.

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The mines beneath Monongah, West Virginia, blew apart on the morning of December the sixth, 1907. The blast tore through the tunnels and broke airshafts, leaving three hundred and sixty-two men and boys dead by the official count. Many in those hills believed that the count was too low, for the miners took their sons and their brothers down with them to load coal, and not everyone’s name found its way into a clerk’s book. By some accounts, nearly a thousand children lost their fathers. One woman who came down as part of the relief effort called Monongah “a tragic little grey town, where sorrow meets one at every step.” That day remains the worst mining disaster in American history.

The town’s grief found its way to a minister’s daughter named Grace Golden Clayton, who had buried her own father some years before and felt the loss freshly now, watching the children who had lost theirs. She said it was partly the explosion that made her think about how loved most fathers are. So she went to her pastor and asked for a service for the fathers who had passed and for all fathers. He agreed. The date was set for the fifth of July, 1908, on the Sunday nearest Grace’s father’s birthday.

The service Grace had asked for was in part a memorial, a mourning for the Monongah fathers, held scarcely seven months after the explosion. Unfortunately, it had the ill luck to fall the day after the Fourth of July, when the town had given itself over to fireworks and celebration and had little sorrow left over for the dead. And what grief remained went elsewhere as a young woman of a prominent local family had died over that same holiday, and the shock of her passing and the funeral that followed drew off the town’s attention. That memorial for the fathers went almost unremarked.

Grace never pushed the idea further. But it was, as far as the historical record best reaches, the first known Father’s Day service in America.

The day, thus, had to be born again. In the spring of 1909, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd sat in a Spokane, Washington church and heard a sermon for Mother’s Day, for the custom was new then and spreading through the churches.

Her mind drifted from the sermon to her own life. Her mother had died in childbirth when Sonora was sixteen, the only daughter among six children. Her father, William Jackson Smart, did not take the expected action of breaking up the family and sending the children to relatives, as a widowed man was counseled to do in those days. He kept his children and raised them on the farm, becoming part of father and mother both, his daughter said, and did so without complaint until every child was grown and gone into a home of his or her own.

Sonora went up to the pastor and said, “I like everything you have said about motherhood,” she told him, “but somehow, ‘father’ seems something apart. Do you not think it would be fair and fine to give father a place in the sun?”

That question led her to write a petition, with two men from the YMCA signing it beside her, which she brought to ministers around Spokane. She wanted the fifth of June, which was her father’s birthday, but the preachers needed time to prepare their sermons, so they set it for the third Sunday of the month.

On the sixth of June, 1910, the Spokane paper announced the day on its front page, and on Sunday the nineteenth, the preachers of that city stood up and preached fatherhood across the town. The people wore roses, red for the fathers still living and white for the fathers who had passed. Sonora Dodd rode out through the streets in a carriage with her baby beside her, carrying flowers and small gifts.

The story went out over the wires. Others, too, began to celebrate. Presidents even offered warm words. Woodrow Wilson took part in the celebration in Spokane in 1916. Calvin Coolidge commended the day in 1924.

But warm words were not law, and bills to make the holiday official kept dying in Congress. In 1957, Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote, “Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable.” Still no bill passed. Congress finally approved the day in 1966, but only for that one year, leaving Lyndon Johnson to proclaim it. In 1972, Richard Nixon signed it into law, sixty-two years after the celebration in Spokane. Sonora Smart Dodd lived to see it all. She died in 1978 at ninety-six years old.

Sources:

* "Father's Day Is Conceived by Spokane's Sonora Smart Dodd and Celebrated for the First Time in Spokane on June 19, 1910." HistoryLink.org, 17 June 2010, www.historylink.org/File/9458.

* "Father's Day—Pic of the Week." In Custodia Legis, Library of Congress, June 2015, blogs.loc.gov/law/2015/06/fathers-day-pic-of-the-week/.

* "It Started Here: Sonora Dodd, the Spokane Mother of Father's Day." The Spokesman-Review, 18 June 2017, www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jun/18/it-started-here-sonora-dodd-the-spokane-mother-of-/.

* Johnson, Lyndon B. “Proclamation 3730—Father’s Day, 1966.” 1966. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-3730-fathers-day-1966.

* Kellogg, Paul U. “Monongah.” Charities and the Commons, vol. 19, 1907–08, pp. 1313–28. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/survey-1897_october-1907-april-1908_19.

* "Monongah Mine Disaster." West Virginia Archives and History, West Virginia Division of Culture and History, archive.wvculture.org/history/disasters/monongah03.html.

* "Monongah Mining Disaster of 1907." Encyclopædia Britannica, www.britannica.com/event/Monongah-mining-disaster-of-1907.

* Nixon, Richard. "Proclamation 4127—Father's Day." 1972. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4127-fathers-day.

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Alice Hathaway Lee exuded grace and was full of energy. Enchanting, some said. She stood 5'7" and was slender, with blue-gray eyes and long, golden hair. Family members called her "sunshine." In so many ways, she was what Theodore Roosevelt was not.

History remembers Theodore as tough, an adventurer, unafraid. But in his earlier years, people described him with other adjectives. One college classmate said Theodore was "thin-chested, spectacled, nervous, and frail." He spoke in a high-pitched voice and, at times, erratically. His laugh, in his mother's words, was like a "sharp, ungreased squeak." And when he danced, "he danced as you'd expect him to dance if you knew him — he hopped."

Theodore met Alice on a weekend visit to the home of a Harvard classmate. It was October of 1878. Theodore was nineteen, and Alice was seventeen.

He was smitten, or maybe you could even say he fell in love at first sight. In either case, this is where the love story begins.

The pair spent the weekend hiking and dancing among friends, and they found time to spend alone. Teddy learned that he could talk to her about politics and poetry, and anything else on his mind.

He wrote of their first meeting: "As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me."

Theodore set his mind on being with her. In early 1879, he proposed.

Alice rejected him.

Though devastated, Theodore didn't stop pursuing, continuing to feel deeply in love with Alice. And Alice, who had grown close to Theodore's sisters, soon started to warm to the young man.

He proposed again the following year, eight months after his first proposal. This time, Alice accepted, and they were engaged on Valentine's Day.

Theodore wrote: "I do not think ever a man loved a woman more than I love her; for a year and a quarter now I have never gone to sleep or waked up without thinking of her."

Alice felt the same now, writing him, "I just long to be with you all the time."

On October 27, 1880, Theodore and Alice were married at her family's home in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Tragically, however, just a few years later, Alice passed away from kidney failure the day after giving birth to the couple's first child. Theodore's mother had passed away just a few hours before.

A devastated Theodore asked his sister to care for the young child, left his job as a New York State Assembly member, and settled in the Dakota territories. He became a rancher and sheriff, and he read and wrote history. But more so, Theodore coped with the deaths. After two years, he returned home to raise his daughter and return to political life.

The pain of losing Alice would stay with him. He didn't speak of her much but wrote the following tribute:

"She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; As a flower she grew, and as a fair beautiful young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine; there had never come to her a single sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for the bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy. As a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her. And when my heart's dearest died, the light went from my life forever."

Sources:

* “Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Hathaway_Lee_Roosevelt

* Felsenthal, Carol. Alice Roosevelt Longworth. New York, Putnam, 1988.

* Miller, Nathan, (1992) Theodore Roosevelt: A Life, pg 158, ISBN 978-0-688-13220-0, ISBN 0-688-13220-0, New York, Quill/William Morrow

* Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, three-quarter length portrait, standing, facing slightly left. [Photographed Between ? and 1884, Printed Later] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/96525603/>.

* Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Light_has_gone_out.jpg

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The statue that would become one of the most famous in the world arrived in New York Harbor on the morning of June 17, 1885.

The ship that carried her, the French man-of-war Isère, had come to anchor in the Horseshoe, off Sandy Hook, twenty-seven days out from France, the early part of it through heavy seas. She lay quiet now in a fog so thick the harbor could not make her out. Only after she emerged from the fog and ran up her private signal was she recognized, and the word went to the city by telegraph at once: the Isère had arrived.

In her hold lay Liberty Enlightening the World. Liberty had been formally presented to the United States on the Fourth of July the year before, and in Paris, she had stood complete in a courtyard, rising over the rooftops of the neighborhood. To bring her across the ocean, the sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi had taken his finished colossus apart. Her copper skin, hammered by hand over wooden molds and hung on an iron skeleton engineered by Gustave Eiffel, came down into some three hundred and fifty separate pieces and went into two hundred and fourteen wooden crates. Each fragment was sheathed in its own casing, numbered so the whole could later be read like a set of instructions. It was a monument shipped as a kit.

When the telegram reached General Charles P. Stone that morning, he was on his way to Bedloe’s Island, where the statue’s pedestal was being built. Stone was the pedestal’s chief engineer, a West Point man who had served in two wars. His job now was to receive this gift and stand her up.

Stone wired an enthusiastic welcome to the Isère‘s commander, Captain Gabriel Lespinasse de Saune, and went down the bay to the ship, where he was received with full courtesy. There, de Saune handed him the official transfer of the statue from the French committee to the American, a document engrossed on parchment, bearing the seal of the French Republic and, decorating its margins, the heads of Washington and Lafayette.

The statue had arrived. There was, however, nowhere to put her yet.

The French people had paid some two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, gathered across France, for the figure, on the understanding that Americans would build the base to set her on. But American fundraising had gone poorly for years. The committee was still a hundred thousand dollars short of what it needed, and there sat the completed gift of a nation, boxed in a ship’s hold off Sandy Hook.

Months before she sailed, the newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer had taken up her cause, turning the front of his New York World into a collection plate. The money for the statue had been raised by the ordinary people of France, he reminded his readers, and thus the fund for the pedestal ought to be raised by the ordinary people of America. “Let us not wait for the millionaires to give us this money,” he wrote.

Pulitzer printed the name of every donor, however small the gift. The donations came from roughly 120,000 people, most giving a dollar or less. By August 11, 1885, the World announced that $100,000 had been raised.

Still, she had to wait. She waited through the rest of that summer, the fall, and a long winter, until the pedestal was finished in April 1886. The pieces came up out of their boxes and were riveted back together over Eiffel’s iron frame throughout that summer.

On October 28, 1886, amid fog and light rain, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty as crowds, estimated by some at close to a million, came out for the day’s celebrations. A little more than sixteen months after the Isère came in, Liberty finally stood above the harbor.

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Sources:

* “Arrival of the Statue of Liberty.” Scientific American, vol. 52, no. 26, 27 June 1885, p. 400. Scientific American, doi:10.1038/scientificamerican06271885-400. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arrival-of-the-statue-of-liberty/

* Boan, Devon. “Statue of Liberty Is Dedicated.” EBSCO Research Starters, EBSCO, 2023, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/statue-liberty-dedicated.

* Currier & Ives. The great Bartholdi statue, Liberty Enlightening the World: the gift of France to the American people. New York: Published by Currier & Ives. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2001702147/>. / Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Currier_and_Ives_Liberty2.jpg

* “Creating the Statue of Liberty.” Statue of Liberty National Monument, U.S. Department of the Interior, 25 Mar. 2025, www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/places_creating_statue.htm.

* Liberty Enlightening the World--Inauguration of the Bartholdi Statue, Harbor of New York--Military and naval salute, the President's arrival at Liberty Island. 1886 Oct. 28. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/97502746/>.

* “Overview + History.” Statue of Liberty, Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, 2026, www.statueofliberty.org/statue-of-liberty/overview-history/.

* “Pulitzer—In Depth.” Statue of Liberty National Monument, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2 Sept. 2025, www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/pulitzer-in-depth.htm.

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There is a fundamental teaching in Judaism called Tikkun Olam. It means repairing the world. For Julius Rosenwald, this idea was a way of life.

Julius had become quite wealthy in his adult years, likely one of the richest men in America at the time. But becoming so had been quite the journey. His father had lived an American immigrant story, arriving from Germany with $20 but with smarts and a dedicated work ethic. From poverty, life slowly evolved into stability. And when Julius was born in 1862, the family lived a block away from Abraham Lincoln's Illinois home.

Julius built from this foundation that his parents had created. He got into the clothing business, though one could say that he was born into it. His father had become a tailor in the U.S. and then ran a clothing store. Julius worked in the shop from a young age. By the middle of high school, he dropped out to work full-time.

Diligent, hard-working, and a believer in the importance of quality products, Julius' career in business flourished. But it was a $37,500 investment in 1895 for 25% of Sears, Roebuck & Co., a Chicago-based mail-order company still looking to find its footing, that would bring him tremendous wealth.

America at the time was amidst a rural revolution, as railroads had opened up vast territories. For these families, however, goods were often hard to come by. Mail-order was an ideal solution. And Julius, who eventually took over as President, focused on the quality of products to transform Sears into a retail giant. By the early 20th century, the company catalog was as ubiquitous in American homes as a family Bible.

Yet, interestingly, Julius would attribute much of his success to luck, writing,

"The big successes are largely due to opportunity. Many men with quite exceptional ability never get a chance. I never had exceptional ability and there are in Sears today many men who are much cleverer than I. To say that I had vision and foresight in going into Sears is nonsense. I went in simply because I saw a good chance. In other words, for precisely the same reason that other young men change their jobs. I had no idea that Sears would develop into five percent of its present size. It was simply a lucky chance that the business developed along such a scale. We ran it efficiently and worked hard and it made money. There is the whole story. The subsequent economic developments of the country have made it into what it is."

That said, Julius was considered one of the great business leaders of his time. But, arguably, it would be his work as a philanthropist that made him particularly special. Julius established the Rosenwald Fund, focusing on education and public health.

Amongst these initiatives, it was in the former that he made a uniquely meaningful and lasting impact. Having been moved by the work of Booker T. Washington and William Henry Baldwin Jr. in helping black Americans thrive, and understanding racism from seeing anti-semitism, Julius funded over 5,300 schools for black students in the South. Though he did take an interesting approach, insisting that communities contribute to the projects, fostering a sense of ownership and partnership. For a time ripe with segregation and lack of funding for education for black students, Julius' initiative and communal method made a significant impact. Over 600,000 students would attend a school.

After his illustrious business career and meaningful work in philanthropy, Julius passed away in 1932.

Sources:

* Ascoli, Peter Max. Julius Rosenwald: The Man who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South. United States, Indiana University Press, 2006.

* BACHMANN, LAWRENCE P. “Julius Rosenwald.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, 1976, pp. 89–105. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23880425. Accessed 18 Dec. 2024.

* Bain News Service, Publisher. Julius Rosenwald. [Between and Ca. 1920] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2014706782/>.

* Oleshansky, Deborah. “Education is the Key to Unlocking a Better Future for All.” The Jewish Observer, https://www.jewishobservernashville.org/article/2023/12/education-is-the-key-to-unlocking-a-better-future-for-all

* Solender, Michael J.. “Inside the Rosenwald Schools.” Smithsonian Magazine, March 30, 2021. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-rosenwald-schools-shaped-legacy-generation-black-leaders-180977340/

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Hi everyone,

Welcome back to Historical Snapshots Conversations. Our guest today is Alexis Coe, and our discussion is about George Washington. There are many conversations we can have about him, but our focus today is on Washington becoming President.

A little about Alexis: she’s a Presidential Historian, American History Columnist at the New York Times, Senior Fellow at New America, and New York Times Bestselling author of (almost!) three books, including You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington. You can follow her work on her Substack publication, Study Marry Kill.

Purchase You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

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Hi everyone,

Welcome back to Historical Snapshots Conversations. Today I’m joined by Katja Hoyer for a discussion about East Germany, from its rise after World War II in 1949 to its collapse with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and some reflections on what has followed.

A little about Katja: she’s a German-British historian, journalist, and author who writes extensively about Germany. You can find her articles in papers such as The Washington Post, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Times, The Financial Times, and The Guardian. Katja has also published the books, Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871–1918 & Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.

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Hi everyone,

Our guest today is Kerry Chaput, and our conversation is about the Filles du Roi (“The King’s Daughters”), a program initiated by the French Crown that sent approximately 800 women to the colony of New France, now part of Canada, between 1663 and 1673. The purpose was to help populate the colony by marrying settlers and starting families. These women are sometimes referred to as the Mothers of Canada.

A little about Kerry: She’s an award-winning author who is dedicated to writing about badass women in history. She also writes historical fiction and has published numerous books, including the Defying the Crown trilogy.

* Subscribe to Kerry’s Substack: Badass Women In History

* Purchase Kerry’s trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09CJG99S2

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