Reading the paper on Sept. 21, 1941.

Negotiations with Japan on reaching a settlement in Japanese-American relations have hit a ‘virtual stalemate,’ although talks will continue in hopes that an eventual resolution can be reached.

Japan has insisted on having a special status in East Asia which would give it rights of control over major Chinese ports and northern provinces.

In return, Japan would abandon plans for a push further south and relinquish claims in French Indochina.

The US has rejected this proposal.

The US is unwilling to grant Japan any special status and has placed half of the US naval fleet on standby in the Pacific.

There is concern that, if the Nazis succeed in defeating the Soviet Union, an emboldened Japan will escalate its aggression in Asia, drawing America into a two-ocean war.

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Europe’s unending wars.

It is July 1, 1916.

At 7:20 a.m. this morning, British forces detonated an underground mine they had laid beneath a German army fortification in northeastern France known as the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt.

A cloud of smoke and soil rose from the hill and filled the air.

Stones showered down on the surrounding hillside, covering it in fragments of chalky bedrock.

And a crater, fifty yards in diameter and sixty feet deep, opened up in the midst of the German defensive line.

The mine was one of nineteen which British tunneling units had placed under the German lines at the Western Front to aid in the British infantry’s advance.

Some, like the Hawthorn Ridge mine and the Lochnagar mine a few miles away, were very large.

Others, intended to knock out smaller German defenses, were small.

The simultaneous explosion of these mines, heard in London two hundred miles away, marked the opening salvo of the Battle of the Somme.

It would prove to be one of the deadliest military battles of the First World War.

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‘Reckless utterances on the stump.’

It is December 3, 1901.

The new president, Theodore Roosevelt, has sent his written Annual Message, now called the State of the Union, to the Congress.

Roosevelt has been in office less than three months — since September 14 — the day on which his predecessor, William McKinley, succumbed to an infection caused by an assassin’s bullets.

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Opportunity cost.

It is September 18, 1862.

A day of great American sadness.

Thousands of dead and wounded Americans lay on farm fields in southern Maryland.

The day before, McClellan’s Army of the Potomac and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, had met in battle along southern Maryland’s Antietam Creek.

Total casualties exceeded 23,000.

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‘I was lucky.’

Survivors of a tragedy often say it was little things breaking their way which made all the difference.

Like Howard Lutnick, whose firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, had offices in the World Trade Center.

While more than half of his employees were killed on 9/11, he survived.

He was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten when the plane struck the North Tower.

Or New York financier J.P. Morgan.

He decided to stay a bit longer in Europe and canceled his reservations on the Titanic just days before she set sail.

He even managed to retrieve an art collection he had stored in Titanic’s hold for the trip.

And so it was with the USS Nevada, a battleship which was moored behind the Arizona on Ford Island’s Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

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To live in a difficult time.

Albert Einstein wrote a reflective essay in 1931 in which he explained his life philosophy.

“How strange is the lot of us mortals!

“Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it.

“But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people—first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent,

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Reading the paper on Sept. 14, 1940.

The Luftwaffe mounted its heaviest bombing raid over Britain to date, striking Buckingham Palace, Downing Street, Whitehall and the House of Lords in an overnight raid which lasted more than eight hours.

The bombing reflects a new Nazi policy, instituted a week ago, which will result in the bombing of London for 56 of the following 57 days and nights.

The Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, sent a telegram to his brother, King George VI, from the Bahamas congratulating him on surviving the Palace bombing.

An appeal is made for American hospitals and doctors to send surplus medical instruments to Britain to aid in the treatment of the injured.

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Goodbye to the buffalo.

It is the late 1860s.

The Civil War is over, and veterans are readjusting to civilian life.

The transcontinental railroad is under construction, as work crews of Irish immigrants, laying track from the East, race to meet crews of Chinese laborers who lay track from the West.

Millions of buffalo [whose scientific name is the “American Bison”] roam in grasslands stretching from the Appalachians to the Rocky Mountains, and from parts of Canada south into Mexico.

Conflict between Native Americans and white settlers, known as the Indian Wars, rages along the Western Frontier.

It is the convergence of these facts which led to the buffalo slaughter.

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What really happened?

It is the morning of September 13, 1862.

Barton Mitchell, a forty-five-year-old former railroad worker, is making coffee over a campfire.

He serves as a corporal in the 27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry.

And he’s encamped with the others in a meadow which a Confederate general’s staff had occupied the day before.

Barton notices something in the grass.

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A friend has lost his son.

It is March 19, 1935, and Ernest Hemingway is making his second attempt to write a condolence letter to his friends, a married couple, who have lost their sixteen-year-old son after a long struggle with tuberculosis.

The letter reflects on death coming to a young person, a specter which Hemingway had witnessed on the battlefields of Europe in the waning days of World War I.

And it offers a prescription for the old, who look among friends and know that death could soon claim any one of them.

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