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.

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe

‘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.’

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe

The largest amphibious invasion in history was about to happen on his watch, departing from his ports, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill intended to witness it first-hand aboard the HMS Belfast.

He would then transfer to a destroyer for a brief inspection of Juno Beach on D-Day afternoon.

That was Churchill’s plan, and he told the British Admiralty to make the necessary arrangements.

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe

New York City was the center of the nation’s garment industry for more than one hundred years.

It began in the late 1840s, when two drivers of economic growth — new machines and eager workers — came together there.

After fits and starts, through the work of several inventors, an easy-to-operate sewing machine had at last become available.

And, at the same time, the city was awash in immigrants needing work.

Among them were skilled tailors and seamstresses who had learned their craft in their home country.

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe

To be a good man in a bad time: the hope of many and the achievement of a few.

Some old words from Rudyard Kipling on this difficult task:

“If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe

Religion’s the thing.

Embrace it and doors open.

But, it has to be the right kind of religion.

“Religiously correct.”

Is your heart in it?

Doesn’t matter.

Wear it on your sleeve.

The show’s the thing.

Only the good-at-heart will have trouble with this, which is something that Mark Twain, that chronicler of post-Civil War America, understood.

Here’s an illustration, with Twain, speaking through the voice of Huckleberry Finn, a good-hearted boy in an evil, racist society who, try as he might, just can’t fit in.

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe

Soviet nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov’s break with his government began when the Soviets detonated “Tsar Bomba,” the most powerful nuclear weapon in history, in 1961.

He was then forty years old and had been at the forefront of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program for thirteen years.

It was Sakharov who had developed the model for controlled nuclear fusion which had made the Soviet hydrogen bomb work.

And he had believed in this effort.

“If the Soviet Union could achieve nuclear parity with the US, then a peaceful international equilibrium would be created,” he said.

But, over time, Sakharov’s illusions fell away.

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe

British tanks and aircraft attacked Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Libya yesterday, hoping to block his combined Italian-German force from advancing further east towards Tobruk, the deep-water Mediterranean port in Tunisia now under British control.

The battle between the German and Soviet armies for Kharkov [Kharkiv], an industrial city in northeastern Ukraine, has ended with tens of thousands of casualties on both sides.

While the Germans succeeded in holding the city, the Soviets claim success in forestalling a German drive further east towards Rostov, the gateway to the Caucasus oil fields.

After a lull forced by bad weather, the air war between Germany and Britain has resumed.

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe

It is 1887.

Gustave Eiffel’s plans for his tower have been published and the foundations have been laid.

And the artists of Paris are up in arms.

With the flair and certainty that only self-anointed experts can muster, they protest to the Paris minister of public works:

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe

Early American history can seem like a rush of events.

The Pilgrims, the Thirteen Colonies, the Revolutionary War, and then — BAM — the Civil War.

It’s easy to overlook the long stretches of time which separated these events.

Case in point: 241 years passed between William Bradford’s stepping onto Plymouth Rock and South Carolina Lieutenant Henry S. Farley firing on Fort Sumter!

It wasn’t only Einstein who noted the relativity of time.

One’s perspective on time is a function of his own lived experience.

The New York Civil War diarist George Templeton Strong illustrates the point with this story from 1864.

“Curious story from George Gibbs, who spent the ten years preceding 1861 in California and Oregon.

Get full access to Photo of the Day at look.substack.com/subscribe