It is September 2, 1901, the opening day of the Minnesota State Fair.

And the keynote speaker for the opening ceremonies is Vice President Theodore Roosevelt.

He will use the ocassion to deliver one of the most memorable lines in history:

‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’

Amid the livestock displays and competition quilts, Roosevelt will lay the ground rules for the nation’s conduct in a rapidly changing world of empires.

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0It is September 6, 1939.

Five days have passed since Germany invaded Poland, sparking war in Europe.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt is writing to her old school friend Carola von Schaffer-Bernstein, a German citizen living in Berlin who supports Hitler.

Dear Carola:

All of us are appalled at plunging the European continent into war, but I do not think there is any bitterness toward the German people in this country.

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Some pictures stick with you.

Here are the ones from last week which have stuck with me:

*****

Soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division stand amid burned tree stumps after conquering Hamburger Hill, near the Laotian border in South Vietnam, May 20, 1969.

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The Allies have commenced an offensive from their 85-mile Normandy beachhead front with the main drive now located south of liberated Bayeux.

The Allies have taken between six and seven hundred square miles of France, a result which General Eisenhower says, ‘exceeded his highest hopes.’

German troops have forced their way back into Montebourg and Carentan, where house-to-house fighting is reported, and tank battles are taking place on the Allied drive east towards Caen.

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The US Census Office produced a map in 1861 which showed the population distribution of the four million enslaved people then living in the Confederacy.

The map was sold to raise funds for the care of sick and wounded Union soldiers.

The map makers used data from the 1860 census.

It showed that one-third of the South’s population of twelve million was enslaved.

And the data for some states is wild: in South Carolina and Mississippi, the first and second states to secede, more than half the population was enslaved!

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Would it matter to Clara Driscoll that few know her name? that she is given little credit for designing exquisite Tiffany leaded-glass lamps that now sell for half a million dollars, or more?

It was Louis Comfort Tiffany’s practice to highlight his own artistic achievements and not publish the names of his designers, but recent discoveries of Driscoll’s letters have brought her achievements to light.

It was Driscoll, the director of Tiffany’s Women’s Glass Cutting Department, who designed the Tiffany lamps with nature themes.

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These things happened January 31, 1968:

Helicopters brought US paratroopers to the rooftop of the US Embassy in Saigon to repel a Vietcong force that had invaded the embassy grounds, killing two Marine guards and five MPs.

The US would suffer its highest number of daily Vietnam casualty deaths on this day — 245 men — and the day would later be considered the second day of the Tet Offensive.

The Senate Foreign Relations committee decided to begin hearings on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which had led to the Congressional authorization for President Johnson to use conventional military forces in Vietnam. The stated purpose of the hearings was ‘to establish the truth about the incident’ and ‘examine the decision-making process of the government in a time of crisis.’

The 83-man crew of the USS Pueblo was in its eighth day of captivity in North Korea. They will be freed in December.

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Hamburger Hill is the American name for a mountain in central Vietnam near the Laotian border.

During the war, the mountain occupied a strategic position along an infiltration route which North Vietnamese soldiers used to enter South Vietnam.

North Vietnamese troops were entrenched there to protect this infiltration route.

In May 1969, 1,800 assault troops from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division were ordered to dislodge the North Vietnamese from the hill by frontal assault.

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Agreement had been reached at Yalta.

There would be a criminal trial of the surviving Nazi leadership.

No summary executions.

But it would be unlike any other criminal trial in world history, staged by an international alliance of the victors who aimed to cobble together the world’s first precepts of international criminal law.

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‘Hitler’s Atlantic sea wall has been breached,’ the headlines scream, ‘with 10,000 tons of bombs clearing the way.’

At daybreak, thousands of Allied troops ‘dropped from the skies of Normandy and swarmed up the beaches from thousands of landing craft, renewing the battle for France and Europe which had been broken off four years ago at Dunkerque.’

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