Sometimes they tell the whole story.

Leonardo da Vinci drew a diagram and specifications for a flying machine, which he called a ‘helical air screw,’ in 1493.

The machine measured about fifteen feet in diameter and was to have been made out of linen, reed and wire.

528 years later, in February 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on the surface of Mars, carrying the Ingenuity helicopter in its belly.

The Ingenuity flew seventy-five flights across the Martian surface during the next three years.

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It is September 13, 1900.

The storm has passed, and Galveston — devastated and in ruin — is cut off.

Relief supplies are pouring into the wharf at nearby Texas City, where boats are ferrying them across Galveston Bay.

Worried men who wanted to search for family members in Galveston are allowed on these boats, but not women.

So, Winifred Black has dressed in men’s clothing and talked her way onto a relief boat.

She will be the first journalist to reach Galveston and her reports will rivet the nation.

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It is July 18, 1863.

650 Black men of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry have mounted an assault on Fort Wagner, the Confederate stronghold in Charleston Harbor.

The assault will end in a costly failure.

At the end of the day, 270 men of the 54th had been killed, wounded, captured or gone missing.

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New Zealanders have blocked temporarily the advance of German invasion forces in Greece’s Thermopylae Pass.

It is the site of the battle 2,400 years ago between the Persian Empire and an alliance of Greek city-states led by Leonidas of Sparta.

The New Zealand effort has enabled the British Expeditionary Force to evacuate most of its troops and equipment for repositioning in Crete.

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It is the afternoon of September 17, 1862.

Federal infantrymen from New York and Pennsylvania have received orders to cross a bridge on Antietam Creek in southern Maryland and capture the high ground on the other side.

That ground is held by men from Georgia who are arrayed there in fortified positions and are prepared to hold it.

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It is July 1, 1934.

President Franklin Roosevelt and his sons have boarded the USS Houston in Annapolis harbor for a one-month cruise to the Virgin Islands, Haiti, Panama and Hawaii.

The trip will enable FDR to meet local officials, tour US military facilities and be seen by large crowds of everyday people.

It comes at a difficult time.

The domestic economy, deep in the grasp of the Great Depression, has occupied much of FDR’s time.

But the rise of militarism in Europe and Japan cannot be ignored.

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When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, Glenn White was the seventeen-year-old film projector operator at the Strand Theater in Emporia, Kansas.

He dropped out of high school, enlisted in the Marines and deployed to the South Pacific.

Glenn’s company landed on the southern coast of Betio Island, a part of the Tarawa atoll in the South Pacific where the Japanese had an airbase, on the night of November 21, 1943.

They fought the Japanese for twenty-four hours, pushing them back from the beach and reaching the end of the runway.

And through it all, Glenn was in the lead.

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A three-year famine struck Sweden in 1867.

The onset year became known as the Year of Great Weakness.

It was the last famine in Europe to arise from Nature.

It hit hardest in Sweden’s north.

There, the winter’s snow did not melt until late June, delaying the spring planting of crops.

Then, the autumn cold came early, ending the growing season prematurely.

Food was scarce and starvation was rampant.

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It is March 7, 1941.

The White House has received a letter from a young boy living in Augusta, Arkansas.

“Dear President,

I am a little country boy eight years old.

I have been going to school three years, and I am now in the third grade.

I got one spanking when I was in the first grade for talking.

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As Allied armies move deep into Germany, US officials say three million German soldiers have been killed, wounded or captured since D-Day, fulfilling General Eisenhower’s prediction that the Allies would break the German army within a year of the Normandy landings.

Magdeburg, Leipzig and Nuremberg are within the Allies’ grasp and pockets of German resistance behind the front lines are being mopped up.

German radio reports say Soviet forces are within fourteen miles of Berlin.

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