In August 1940, Flora Robertson spoke to journalists from a migrant camp in California about her old home in Oklahoma.

She had come to Oklahoma Territory as a child in 1904, traveling from Arkansas with her family in a covered wagon.

‘When we first went there, we lived in a little log cabin.

In those days, we would start our crop and sometimes, why the horse thieves would come through.

They was pretty bad then, there was a lot of horse thieves.

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Old words from Walt Whitman.

“Great is Justice;

Justice is not settled by legislators and laws…

it is in the soul.

It cannot be varied by statutes any more than love or pride or the attraction of gravity can,

It is immutable…

it does not depend on majorities…

majorities or what not come at last before the same passionless and exact tribunal.

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Meriwether Lewis writes to President Thomas Jefferson on April 7, 1805, from Fort Mandan, a Native American village on the banks of the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota.

“Dear Sir.

Herewith inclosed you will receive an invoice of certain articles, which I have forwarded to you from this place:. 67. specimens of earths, salts and minerals; and 60 specimens of plants; these are accompanyed by their rispective labels expressing the days on which obtained, places where found, and also their virtues and properties when known.

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A second-grader from New Hampshire, writes to the president:

“Dear Mr. President Kennedy,

It is past my bedtime but I would sleep better if I wrote to [you] first.

You have many big things to think about all of the time and one of them is the doctor shortage.

When I grow up I plan to be a doctor like my daddy so please do not worry about the doctor shortage anymore.

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A British infantryman writes from Ypres, in northern France, in 1916:

In early April we were dispatched with all possible speed to Ypres.

Here we went in to support the Canadians and spent a most unpleasant eight days, during which time we lost several hundred men.

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Defeated German troops have begun mass surrenders.

Soviet premier Stalin has ordered a thousand guns in Moscow to fire thirty rounds each in celebration of victory over the Nazis.

After the German surrender in Berlin, Soviet Marshal Zhukov gave a dinner for the Allied delegation which lasted until 6:00 am.

The dinner, which featured twenty-five toasts, included Zhukov’s toast to General Eisenhower (still in France) calling him ‘one of the greatest generals of the present times.’

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A letter from the California gold fields of 1850.

“Dear George,

I have passed through so many scenes and changes of condition that I scarcely know what to write.

We arrived in the Sacramento Valley in the rainy season.

Rain and mud was everywhere.

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Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,

Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

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Take a look:

On the left, Thaddeus Lowe observes the 1862 Civil War Battle of Fair Oaks in Northern Virginia from his balloon, the Intrepid.

On the right, Billings, Montana, resident Chase Doak’s photo of a Chinese surveillance balloon flying overhead.

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It is Tuesday, June 6, 1944.

Norman Brown, a B-17 radio operator, is writing in his diary:

“Tuesday, 6th.

This is it.

D-day.

We were in the first wave of heavies [B-17s] over the coast.

It was the greatest sight a person could see.

And if I lived to be a thousand, I could never forget it.

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