What Happened Today

The politics of New York City were always different from the rest of the North during the Civil War. Thanks to immigration and machine politics, it was a Democratic stronghold, and that was only strengthened through commercial ties to the South through cotton trading. So it was always iffy about the Union cause. Then, shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Congress passed an Enrollment Act which would require a draft among able bodied men, or at least the ones who couldn't afford to hire a substitute or to pay a commutation. Therefore, when the draft was actually held, riots broke out. Various gangs, some tied to Volunteer Fire Companies, helped spur the general animus. Newspaper offices and government buildings were set on fire. Eventually, African-Americans became the main target. Black men were lynched by the mob. White women who were said to associate with black men were singled out. Most horrifyingly, the Colored Orphan Asylum was completely burned to the ground. The riots were finally quelled when troops were marched quickly from Maryland to Manhattan.

The Battle of Aughrim was the battle that truly ended the Williamite War in Ireland, yet it also probably should not have taken place. After all, just a little over a year earlier, King William III of England, Scotland, and Ireland had defeated the former King, and his father-in-law, James II at the Battle of the Boyne, near Dublin. This cemented William's position as monarch along with his wife Mary, as well as causing James to permanently go into exile in France. Yet in Ireland, the Williamite and Jacobite forces still fought without their respective Kings. The Williamites, a collection of Protestants from all over Europe, were led by Dutch general Godert de Ginkell. The Jacobites, mostly Irishmen, were commanded by the Marquis de St. Ruth, a French general. St. Ruth believed the boggy area around the fortification at Aughrim gave him an advantage. Instead, the two armies just got overwhelmed and confused. Finally, once St. Ruth was decapitated by a cannonball, the Williamites would win. While the Battle of Aughrim would be celebrated in the immediate aftermath, the celebration associated with the Twelfth of July would later become attached to the Boyne, reducing the significance of Aughrim.

By 1804, deulling had begun to fall out of favor for much of Americans, so it was fairly odd that the sitting Vice President killed a former Secretary of the Treasury in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. The duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton should probably never have taken place. Their conflict began as a simple political conflict, when Hamilton was the chief person to stop Aaron Burr from becoming President in the complicated, highly contentious 1800 Presidential Election. Hamilton said Jefferson had his support, because while he disagreed with Jefferson's policies, he was certain Jefferson had actual policies and Burr was simply power hungry. After Burr proved to be a loathed Vice President, he tried to extend his political career by becoming New York's Governor. Hamilton sunk that, too, by criticizing Burr. So Burr demanded an apology. Hamilton refused. Burr then challenged Hamilton to a duel. Somehow, it happened. Hamilton supposedly "threw away his shot" at the start of the duel. Burr fired a deadly shot at Hamilton, which would kill him a day later. It ended Hamilton's life and Burr's political career.

When Nazi Germany took over eastern Poland from the Soviet Union after Operation Barbarossa, a series of attacks against Jews happened across Poland. In Jedwabne, Poland, citizens of the town, influenced and directed by members of the Gestapo and the Ordnungspolizei, rounded up all the Jewish men in the town, marched them to a barn, and burned the barn to the ground. What made the pogrom in Jedwabne different from all the others was the way it would be remembered in history. Under Communist control, a group of Polish men were labeled collaborators and traitors, but the chief blame for the pogrom fell on the Nazis. In West Germany, specific Nazi leaders were blamed. Both investigations had serious issues. Then in 2000 and 2001, new research and investigations picked up the debate over where the blame for the pogrom should be placed. While some people said the Polish Catholic citizens are chiefly responsible and other still want to put responsibility on Nazis, what is clear is that a variety of very specific factors, most especially the Nazi invasion, contributed to one of the worst instances of anti-semitic violence in World War II.

When the film vault belonging to 20th Century Fox in Little Ferry, New Jersey went up in flames, most people were shocked that a fire happened at all. The building was made to be completely fireproof, to avoid the kind of fires that happened around film. Yet the conflagration in Little Ferry proved that one of the problems in using nitrate film stock was that it could spontaneously combust. This meant a facility with poor ventilation and nitrate film strips stacked next to each other was ripe for a fire once a massive heat wave came through. The building actually caught on fire in the early morning hours, making firefighters slow to respond. Nitrate also lets out oxygen as it burns, making it nearly impossible to put out. Two people died, and five homes were destroyed. As to the films, everything in the vault was lost, including works by stars like Theda Bara, Tom Mix, and Buster Keaton. The fire taught an important lesson in fireproofing film vaults even better, as well as making sure to preserve copies of films in more secure ways.

Reconstruction was supposed to be the thing that brought the country together after the Civil War and established political and civil rights for newly freed slaves. Overall, it was a mixed bag, as political animosity made certain reforms completely unworkable, but Reconstruction also allowed for all-black communities like Hamburg, South Carolina to flourish. By 1876, though, Reconstruction was falling apart, and in Hamburg on Independence Day two white planters in a carriage accosted a marching drill of a black National Guard regiment. When the National Guard did not allow the planters to pass, the white men sought legal recourse. Somehow, that led to an armed mob of one hundred men going to Hamburg four days later. Attacking the armory, containing most of the National Guard troops, they managed to haul out a handful of men. Creating a "death circle," the white mob then summarily executed four people. In other gunfire, another black Hamburg resident and one member of the white mob were killed. Although the men involved were indicted for murder, nothing came of it and the Hamburg massacre set the tone for the 1876 South Carolina Gubernatorial Election and state politics for the rest of the century.

New York in the 1830s was divided along a variety of ethnic, political, and economic lines. It was also a boom town experiencing a tremendous amount of immigration. So when anti-abolitionists went after the Chatham Street Chapel, which was hosting a congregation of African-Americans, many people joined the riot. The Chatham Street Chapel was not just any church, but the home congregation of famous evangelist Charles Grandison Finney funded by the notable abolitionist merchants Arthur and Lewis Tappan. This made it target number one for people angered by the increasing number of freedmen in New York and their abolitionist allies. There were also rumors of black gangs roaming the streets, although this was based on essentially nothing. Eventually, the chaotic nature of New York, plagued by gang violence and lack of law and order, made attacks on abolitionists into a full scale riot. These riots would be calmed down, but they would also make Charles Finney leave New York and harm the reputation of the Tappans. Really, it was a symbol of New York's shocking tendency to violence in the era.

Thomas More was executed for treason because of a religious dispute. It wasn't heresy, because that is not how the English Reformation played out. Specifically, More could not acknowledge that Henry VIII was the Supreme Head of the Church of England. He could take an oath acknowledging Henry's temporal power, or he could never have been the Lord High Chancellor of England. Still, it was Henry's desire to annul his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon and remarry to Anne Boleyn. After the Pope did not grant Henry's wishes, Henry listened to reformers and split from the Catholic Church. Although More was a reformer and humanist, he could not countenance this break from the Papacy. Initially, it seemed fine for More simply to resign his post as Lord High Chancellor. Yet his many enemies came after him, and More could not under good conscience say that the crown was the head of the Church in England. He tried to use legal reasoning to say he wasn't actively committing treason for never outright denying Henry's status as head of the Church of England. So he was found guilty of treason, and sentenced to be executed.

The bikini was revolutionary. It was a shockingly minimal amount of fabric for a swimsuit, basically just four triangles strung together just right. To push the envelope even further, the bikini's designer, Louis Reard, gave it the name of the South Pacific atoll where a nuclear test had just taken place. Reard was not the first designer to create a two-piece women's bathing suit. In the 1930s, it had become standard for women to wear two-piece suits, but they always covered the navel and had wide coverage compared to the bikini. Reard wasn't even the first designer to introduce an extremely skimpy swimsuit, as he was beaten to that a month earlier by Jacques Heim. Yet it was Reard's name that caught on, especially because he introduced his product at a well attended press conference at Piscine Molitor, the popular pool in Paris. He had a nude dancer named Micheline Bernardini model his bikini, because no real fashion model wanted to wear it. The bikini took awhile to catch on, but after actress Brigitte Bardot wore one on the beach at Cannes in 1953, the bikini was on its way to becoming the main form of swimwear for women.

The Declaration of Independence was, in a way, late to the party when it came to the American Revolution. Shots were first fired over a year earlier, and the calls for independence had been taking place throughout the spring of 1776. Yet the Continental Congress took time to consider exactly how to phrase the document that would announce independence. Partly, this was a problem with whether or not the Continental Congress had authority to declare independence. A Committee of Five, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, John Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson, crafted a plan for the language of the document and an outline for the arguments, while Thomas Jefferson wrote a first draft. Then the Congress edited the document and agreed to it on July 2. On July 4, 1776, they finally sent out the Declaration of Independence. Although its promises and ideals were not always covered in America, the arguments presented allowed for various groups to assert their rights as citizens throughout American history.