What Happened Today

In the summer of 1864, the best hope the Confederacy had for a victory was that troops under Robert E. Lee in Northern Virginia and Joseph E. Johnston's men in North Georgia would hold out just long enough. If by the U.S. Presidential Election in 1864 the situation seemed so difficult, whoever beat Abraham Lincoln would negotiate a treaty with the Confederacy. It was a slim chance. General William Tecumseh Sherman was steadily moving through Georgia, while Ulysses S. Grant was keeping pressure on Lee. By late July, Sherman had outflanked his was almost right to the rail hub at Atlanta. Then Confederate President Jefferson Davis replaced Johnston with the much more aggressive John Bell Hood. Hood attacked at Peachtree Creek and saw massive losses. At the end of August, Sherman had surrounded the city and was putting pressure on Hood's lines south of Atlanta at Jonesborough. On August 31, Hood launched an attack that proved disastrous. When Sherman returned the attack on September 1, Hood's lines held, but he decided to evacuate the city anyway, destroying Atlanta's rail lines and munitions factories in massive explosions and handing a massive victory to the Union cause.

Operation Himmler saw agents of Nazi Germany try a series of false flag operations in Poland one day before the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. The idea was to have a pretext for the invasion, which Adolf Hitler did not want to do in a way that would anger the British or French. Although named for the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, the Operation was planned by Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Office. Heydrich would later plan out the worst abuses of the Holocaust, but in 1939 he was told he had to figure out these false flag operations. The idea was that a variety of targets in German areas of Poland would be hit by SS officers dressed as Polish Army soldiers. They would fire into the air and leave dead bodies, freshly procured from concentration camps. The most famous incident was at a radio tower in Gleiwitz (now Gliwice), which saw the men who attacked the station also issue a broadcast saying Polish troops were attacking Germans. This became key to the propaganda about the invasion the next day, including in Hitler's speech declaring war. Nonetheless, almost no one believed it really was the cause of the invasion, and World War II would begin instantly.

At the end of summer 1918, the Bolsheviks began to consolidate their power in what had until recently been the Russian Empire through the Soviets, or local committees. This did not mean they were in full control of the government, but instead were opposed by various groups. The Bolsheviks were Marxists led by Vladimir Lenin who had launched the October Revolution, the second Revolution in Russia in 1917, against the democratically elected Constituent Assembly. This made Lenin a target for a variety of people. So it was not too surprising someone fired shots at Lenin after he gave a speech at a Moscow arms factory. The would-be assassin was identified as Fanny Kaplan, a member of the democratic-socialist Socialist Revolutionary Party. She gave a statement after her arrest that she viewed Lenin as a "traitor to the Revolution." The Bolsheviks then instigated the Red Terror, a term they embraced for their violent purge of political opponents. Kaplan was shot at the Kremlin. Many other people were rounded up and killed during the next few months, which helped secure the Bolshevik position in the Russia Civil War and the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922.

Hurricane Katrina was a massive hurricane, Category 5 at one point and astonishingly wide across, but what made it the costliest hurricane in American history was that it hit almost directly on New Orleans. Originally hitting South Florida as a Tropical Storm, Katrina stalled out in the Gulf of Mexico and picked up strength. Although Southeastern Louisiana, Southern Mississippi, and coastal portions of Alabama were given evacuation orders, many people were left, particularly in New Orleans. New Orleans sits below sea level between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, guarded by a series of levees. The extreme storm surges and high winds meant most of the city was underwater. Some people found shelter in the Louisiana Superdome, but others were left to fend for themselves in flooded, resource-less areas. The death toll would be estimated at over 1,200 people, and the damages topped $100 billion. The reaction and recovery to the storm became highly problematic, and the actions of government agencies were a serious issue, involving negligence and violence. Most importantly, the city of New Orleans did not really recover in full from Hurricane Katrina.

14 year old Emmett Till was a Chicago native, where he lived with his mother and grandmother. In the summer of 1955, he was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi and went with cousins into Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market. There, he had an interaction with 21-year old Carolyn Bryant. Something about that interaction made Carolyn Bryant tell her husband Till had come on to her. So Roy Bryant found who had been in his store, and four days later Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Emmett Till from the home of his great-uncle Mose Wright in the early morning hours of August 28. Then, they beat him, took him to a shed, shot him, and dropped his body into the Tallahatchie River. When Till's body washed up three days later, swollen and mutilated, everyone knew who had committed the crime. Yet once the crime became a national news story, largely thanks to his mother asking for his body to come back to Chicago for an open casket funeral. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were put on trial for kidnapping and murder less than a month later. Despite positive identification by Mose Wright and clear evidence Bryant and Milam committed the crime, they were acquitted. The murder of Emmett Till, especially the resulting acquittal, caused national outrage and became a significant moment in the Civil Rights Movement.

Krakatoa was known as a volcanic island well before 1883, and it was billowing smoke throughout the summer of 1883. Even that history could not prepare anyone for the eruption that would take place there. On August 26th, large ash columns issued from the three peaks of the island and explosive sounds were heard. Then on August 27th, explosions unlike anything else in recorded history took place. The noise of the eruption was possibly the loudest noise in recorded history. People up to 3,000 miles away heard an explosive sound, and even believed it was nearby cannon fire. The eruption caused tsunamis that damaged population centers along the nearby Sumatran coast. Waves would rock boats across the Indian Ocean. The majority of the island itself was destroyed, with only the southern end remaining. Temporary ash islands were developed. Across the globe, the effects were felt for years. Skeletons and volcanic rock would wash up on Africa's coast. The global temperature dropped over 1 degree centigrade, and massive rains took place. The sulfur in the atmosphere also caused the sky to change, as sunsets were more vibrant. Most strikingly, this made Krakatoa a global event, perhaps one of the first natural disasters to be one.

The Battle of Crecy was one of the landmark victories for England during the Hundred Years' War. In Northern France, King Edward III of England personally led an army to victory against his cousin, King Philip VI of France. Their conflicts began because Edward refused, in his role as Duke of Aquitaine, refused to swear fealty to the King of France, and then asserted he had a better claim to the throne than Philip. Through the late 1330s and early 1340s, Edward waged a series of campaigns throughout the Low Countries and Northern France. Yet Edward never had a massive breakthrough. By the summer of 1346, the English forces looked like they would threaten Paris. Philip then pulled his own troops to meet the English. Once Philip began marching, Edward took a defensive position at Crecy. From there, Edward was able to effective deploy his longbowmen against the French soldiers, and the English would rout the French. Despite this impressive victory, very little changed on the ground and the conflict would continue to rage on and off for decades.

John Birch was an Army intelligence officer in China, who had learned Mandarin as a Fundamentalist Baptist missionary and proved effective behind enemy lines during World War II. Eleven days after Japan officially surrendered, Birch was leading an intelligence unit when he encountered soldiers of the Chinese Communist People's Liberation Army. The PLA soldiers would shoot and kill Birch after an argument; the rest of Birch's men were captured and released two months later. Birch's death was not nationally famous at the time, although certain politicians noted his death at the hands of communists. John Birch would become a notorious name beginning in 1958, when arch conservative businessman Robert H. Welch, Jr., founded the "John Birch Society." Welch's group was ardently anti-communist, to the point of believing pretty much everything was a communist conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. Government. This included many actual U.S. Government officials. Through letter writing and strident pamphlets, the John Birch Society became a pariah even among the anti-communist right. Although John Birch was certainly a conservative anti-communist, it is unclear what he would have thought of the society that took his name.

The four young men who planted a car bomb outside Sterling Hall on the campus of the University of Wisonsin-Madison called themselves the "New Years Gang," after a failed bombing on New Years' Eve 1969. Their bombing of Sterling Hall was more successful, but perhaps not more well planned. In addition to blowing up the Army Research Center, the group's intended target, they also killed one researcher and injured three other people. This was despite planting the bomb in the early morning hours and calling in a bomb threat to limit casualties. The bomb was set to oppose the actions of America in the Vietnam War. Really, it only created more alarm about radical left wing violence. The increasingly violent elements of the countercultural left had more visibility and work in 1970, largely thanks to the Weather Underground. Yet the Sterling Hall bombers, Karl Armstrong, Dwight Armstrong, David Fine, and Leo Burt, were not connected to anyone else. They also instantly fled the country. Karl Armstrong was captured two years later, David Fine was apprehended in 1976, and Dwight Armstrong was arrested seven years later. Leo Burt is still on the lam. Most importantly, all four seemed to represent something different about the radical left at the time.

Jan-Erik Olsson did not go into the Kreditbanken on the Norrmalmstorg square in Stockholm planning to take hostages. Really, he just wanted to rob the bank. Unfortunately for him, the police tried to prevent his robbery, so he decided to take four bank employees hostage. His demands included weapons, money, and a getaway car so he could release the hostages, but most importantly he asked to have Clark Olofsson to join him at the bank. Olofsson was the most famous criminal in Sweden, with a string of bank robberies, prison escapes, and accessory to the murder of a policeman to his name. Olsson and Olofsson had met in prison, and the Swedish authorities delivered Olofsson to Olsson. Once they held four hostages in a bank vault, they then began treating their hostages with a measure of sympathy and kindness. The hostage crisis was national and international news, which meant Olsson was able to talk on the phone with Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Because the hostages repeatedly begged authorities to not harm their captors, the hostage standoff lasted for six days. In the end, the police moved in after distributing tear gas. The hostages' relationship with their captors helped coin the term "Stockholm syndrome," although the actual story was much more complicated than a simple psychological principle.