It is July 16, 1858.

Abraham Lincoln is in Bloomington, Illinois, sitting in an audience which has gathered to hear Senator Stephen A. Douglas speak.

Douglas, a Democrat, is running for reelection and Lincoln has emerged as his main challenger.

The long-simmering issue of slavery has been shoved to the front burner with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Dred Scott case.

‘Black people are not citizens,’ the Court had said, ‘and the federal government has no power to prohibit slavery in US territories.’

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Even as the stock market surged in the 1920s, with stock prices more than quadrupling in value, an economic depression was beginning to take hold on American farms.

They had prospered during the 1910s.

Europe’s devastation from World War I towards the end of the decade, had brought a surge in export demands for farm products.

So, farmers had borrowed money to buy new equipment and additional farmland to boost production.

But when Europe recovered from World War I, the international demand for farm products fell.

Surpluses of farm products drove prices down, making farmland less valuable.

Farm foreclosures, once rare, became commonplace.

Then, in 1930, things got much worse.

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Some pictures stick with you.

Here are the ones from last week, which we posted here on Substack or on our Bluesky page or on our YouTube Channel, which have stuck with me:

American soldiers compete in a footrace in France in 1918.

Civil Conservation Corps guys haul a log along a mountain path in the mid-1930s.

This young woman works in the cotton fields during the Depression while wearing a pretty dress and earrings.

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The clash between Congressional isolationists and the Roosevelt Administration was in full view yesterday when Navy officials answered senators’ questions about the new US military presence in Iceland and denied reports that US naval forces had engaged in combat with German vessels.

But leaked, secret Congressional testimony suggests that a US Navy destroyer dropped a depth charge recently against a German submarine which menaced its rescue of survivors from a sunken British ship.

Ed: It will later be learned that the incident in question occurred off the coast of Iceland in April 1941, when the USS Niblack dropped three depth charges against a suspected U-boat as it picked up British sailors in three lifeboats.

The German navy will later say there were no U-boats present in the area at the time, a conclusion which the US Navy will officially accepted.

Yet, the incident will be viewed as the first naval engagement between Germany and the US.

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In the midst of the year-old Civil War, as Federal troops took control of New Orleans and Confederate General Stonewall Jackson racked up victories in Virginia, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law.

It was a remarkable juxtaposition.

Here was the federal government, expending blood and treasure to correct national sins of the past, while simultaneously providing millions of its people with a gateway to the future.

As Lincoln said, “[T]he wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition.’

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In 1835, showman P.T. Barnum purchased an enslaved woman named Joice Heth and presented her to audiences as George Washington’s 161-year-old former nurse.

Was she real?

Barnum had proof!

When he bought Joice, he was given a document purporting to show that in 1727, five years before George Washington’s birth, Washington’s father owned a fifty-four-year-old enslaved woman named Joice Heth.

What more do you need?

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In the 1930s, the federal government was the answer to prayers for poor, unemployed young men.

Those between the ages of 17 and 28 could enlist in the Civilian Conservation Corps where they could work, learn new, marketable skills, and earn $30 per month, with most of that going to their families.

And they would travel and receive food, clothing, medical care and undergo physical conditioning.

They’d live outdoors in large work camps with people from different parts of the country.

It was a promise of adventure and new possibilities.

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What keeps you going during dark times?

For many of the young men America sent to France in World War I, it was sports.

Football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, boxing, and track and field.

The War Department had a bureau which helped to organized things and the YMCA was involved, too, especially in promoting boxing.

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Some pictures stick with you.

Here are the ones from last week, which we posted here on Substack or on our Bluesky page or YouTube Channel, which have stuck with me:

Jack Kennedy and his older brother, Joe, Jr., on the beach in Massachusetts.

President Macron presenting the Legion of Honor to Ben Miller, a former paratrooper medic, who flew to the Normandy beaches on a glider on D-Day evening to care for the wounded.

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American forces in northern France celebrated the nation’s 166th birthday at noon yesterday by firing in unison all of their artillery pieces at German positions.

American infantrymen are fighting through heavy rain and mud along a thirty-five-mile front in their advance towards St. Lo.

British and Canadian forces have linked up west of Caen in their press to capture the city.

French resistance fighters have severed the main rail line connecting Normandy to southern Germany.

Allied sources report that, once Allied troops had secured their D-Day landing zones, French resistance fighters met them there and worked as guides as the troops fought their way inland.

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