It is July 18, 1863.

Confederate soldier George Robinson is writing to his wife, Elvira, from a convalescent camp in Virginia where he is recovering from a fever.

George enlisted with a South Carolina infantry unit thirteen months ago.

On July 2, his unit assaulted Federal forces in a peach orchard near Gettysburg on the second day of the three-day battle.

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Three Munich University students were executed last week after the Gestapo discovered a cell of activists there who were writing and distributing anti-Nazi literature on campus.

The Gestapo then closed the university for a day, and when it reopened, many students were missing, suggesting that others have been arrested.

This comes one month after siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of the White Rose student resistance group on the Munich campus, were beheaded for posting anti-Nazi flyers.

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It is July 2, 1863, and the afternoon temperature in Gettysburg has reached the low 80s.

Daniel Sickles, the commander of a Federal force of ten thousand men, has set up his field headquarters on the outskirts of town beneath a large swamp white oak on Peter Trostle’s farm.

The shade of the oak tree, then seventy-five years old and of good size, offered a welcome respite from the damp heat wafting across the open farm fields.

Rain was coming.

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It is March 9, 1865.

Iowa farmer Jozef Kostlan, a recent immigrant, is writing to his family in Bohemia, whom he left in the 1850s.

His journey to America had begun on an emigrant ship in Bremen, Germany, then a major debarkation port for European emigrants.

After arriving in New York, he took a six-day train trip to Chicago, followed by another train trip to Cedar Rapids, in eastern Iowa, a place in which many Czech immigrants had settled.

After years of effort, Jozef owns an eighty-acre farm and five acres of woods and lives with his young family in a small house with “floors of nice, soft wood.”

And Iowa is proving to be a farmer’s paradise.

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“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

In the history of the earth, the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir.

Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night.

Here is action untied from strings, necessarily blind to particulars and details, magnificently moving in masses.

Here is the hospitality which for ever indicates heroes.

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It was a young man’s war.

The story is written on their faces.

And the old man, Edward Steichen, took their pictures.

No glory shots.

Just ‘a day in the life’ of young warriors

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It is July 9, 1876.

Army Captain Thomas Tolman is writing to his brother from Fort Sully, in the Dakota Territory.

George Armstrong Custer and his company have been dead for two weeks.

Two years earlier, Custer had led an expedition of a thousand cavalry soldiers, Indian scouts, journalists and gold miners to the Dakota’s Black Hills, in violation of a treaty with the Sioux, to investigate reports of gold deposits there.

Tom’s letter tells a tale of dashed hopes.

The government’s treaty violation to enable white men to search for instant wealth had brought riches to just a few.

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Armored units of the US Third and Seventh Armies have smashed through disorganized German defenses in southwestern Germany.

The American advance has narrowed the German escape route to the east to twenty miles.

American aircraft have pounded German convoys heading East, destroying hundreds of vehicles of all types, including 82 horse-drawn vehicles.

Between 30,000 to 45,000 German troops have been captured in the last 48 hours.

Meanwhile, a radio report says the Americans have thrown up a huge smokescreen along the northern reaches of the Rhine River to disguise preparations for a cross-river assault.

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Today, some old words of resilience from William Ernest Henley which are said to have comforted Nelson Mandela during his long South African imprisonment.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

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It is October 19, 1842.

Charles Dickens’s travel memoir of his six-month trip across North America has been published.

It is a work filled with details of places and people, customs and institutions.

And Dickens, ever the keen observer, finds much about America to admire.

But American society has flaws, Dickens says.

Among them is the love of the ‘good deal’ and the idolization of successful businessmen.

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