What Happened Today

The Troubles, the long running conflict in Northern Ireland, really began in the summer of 1969, when riots broke out after civil rights protests by Catholics. At that point, the British Army ramped up its presence in Northern Ireland to keep peace and maintain order between Protestant and Catholic paramilitary forces. By the summer of 1970, the Catholic and Nationalist Provisional Irish Republican Army began squaring off against the Protestant and Unionist Ulster Volunteer Force. So the British Army, joined by the mostly Protestant police force the Royal Ulster Constabulary, searched the Falls district of Belfast for weapons stores of the IRA. This led to small scale rioting by neighborhood residents, which was responded to by the Army with tear gassing and a call for reinforcements. That only increased the violent reaction in the area. By 10 pm that night a curfew was placed over 3,000 homes, almost all of them belonging to Catholics. A house by house sweep was undertaken in a reckless, strong arm manner. While the Army would find weapons during their search, after the curfew was lifted three days later, the everyday, working class Catholic population had turned against the British Army in Belfast and all of Northern Ireland.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a relatively simple law, banning segregation in public facilities, guaranteeing equal access to voter registration, and empowering the Attorney General to sue municipal and state government. Still, passing the law was extremely challenging. The idea of a Civil Rights Act was introduced by President John F. Kennedy in the summer of 1963. He immediately faced opposition from Southerners in his own Democratic Party, even though the Party leaders in both houses supported it. Then in November, Kennedy was assassinated, and his successor Lyndon Johnson used Kennedy's death to pressure the Congress. Specific lawmakers became the biggest hurdle, as segregationists fought to have the bill never come to a vote. Therefore, congressional leadership bypassed some usual rules. In the end, and after a two month filibuster by Southern Senators, both houses of Congress would overwhelmingly vote in favor of the bill. This made Lyndon Johnson the President to get Civil Rights Legislation to become law, but it also created a political realignment.

When William III of England, Scotland, and Ireland took his throne in 1688, he had done so at the invitation of leaders in England bothered by the birth of a son to the recently converted Catholic King James II. So William, Dutch defender of Protestantism and husband of James' daughter Mary, easily took the throne alongside his wife. Yet James' flight to France proved only a respite, as he began planning an invasion of England from Ireland. Backed by the French King Louis XIV and the Catholic gentry in Ireland, James had a formidable force. William met him on the River Boyne with a multinational, Protestant army. The Battle itself was rather simple, as William outmaneuvered James with a small flanking move by one detachment of troops. William was able to launch his troops across the river, slowly pushing back his enemy. Then, when it looked like a counterattack could stall William, James himself fled the field. With his victory, William established his rule, as well as Protestantism and Constitutional Monarchy in Britain. From that moment, the Battle of the Boyne would be a great symbol of the conflict between Protestant Unionists and Irish Nationalists in Ireland.

Ernst Röhm was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and oldest associates, having founded the Sturmabteilung and been arrested with Hitler in 1923 for the Beer Hall Putsch. Yet once Hitler took power in 1933, Röhm began to be seen as a threat. He wanted a much more socialist form of National Socialism and believed he deserved to subsume the German Army, the Reichswehr, under his authority. He also was known to have homosexual affairs with junior officers, which highly bothered other Nazis like Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Goring. Röhm still wielded immense authority, but throughout 1934, political maneuverings took place to strip him of power. So Hitler told Röhm that he wanted a meeting of the senior leadership of the SA. Instead, he arrested or shot most of the leadership of the SA. The Nazis also went after prominent anti-Nazi conservatives such as former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, killing over 85 people. Röhm was arrested and asked to commit suicide the next day. He said he wanted "Adolf to do it." Instead, two other Nazis shot him. In the aftermath of the purge, Hitler took full power and justified his actions by claiming Röhm and Schleicher were about to undertake a coup.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower had two experiences as an Army officer which shaped his desire to create a Federal Interstate Highway Act. The first was a convoy in 1919 that took two months to travel on bad roads across the country, while the second was seeing the German autobahn as Supreme Commander Allied Forces in World War I. The Federal Interstate system he signed into law was the largest public works project in American history to that time. It had the simple idea of connecting most major cities in America, and stretching across the country from border to border and coast to coast. This would help with the transport of military equipment, while also providing a new mode of car travel. The plan was for every interstate highway to be ready in a decade. It took much longer than that, with major highways only being finished in the 1980s. The system would be added to as well, with spurs and connections tacked on in later years. Yet the Interstate Highway System would transform the way that America moved goods and people, cementing America as a car culture.

The Treaty of Versailles officially ended World War I on June 28, 1919, with a negotiated settlement of Germany's territorial losses, reparations, and demilitarization. The fighting of World War I actually ended months earlier, in November 1918, but the desire of France, Britain, and the United States to seek a specific peace with Germany led to a great deal of debate and negotiation. Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France, wanted to punish Germany. UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George sought out a balance that would keep Germany as a trading partner. US President Woodrow Wilson had the lofty aims of his Fourteen Points. The Treaty of Versailles leaned more towards Clemenceau's view, as it made Germany pay reparations at an astonishing level and demilitarized the country. John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist who was on the British delegation, called it a "Carthaginian peace." Germany agreed, and wanted to not sign the Treaty, but they were threatened with an Allied invasion. So the Germans finally came to the table to sign the Treaty of Versailles five years to the day after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which sparked the war.

The battleship Potemkin would become a grand symbol of the Soviet Union because its mutiny was an example of "workers," enlisted men," against the well-off officers onboard. Yet the actual mutiny was an outgrowth of very specific conditions in 1905. In the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Navy was humiliated and devastated by the Japanese Navy after April 1905. Meanwhile, back at home, a Revolution had broken out in January 1905 in St. Petersburg, which featured various uprisings around the Russian Empire. This discord even reached the Black Sea Fleet at Sebastopol, where a group of revolutionary soldiers planned a mass mutiny. Its planned day of mutiny came and went, but then one of the leaders, Afanasi Matushenko, led a mutiny on his ship, the Battleship Potemkin. The mutiny was actually triggered by a refusal of the men to eat borscht with rotten meat, which then led to the First Officer threatening to shoot the men. He was killed for his troubles, along with most other officers. The Potemkin was then at a loss, as the committee that steered the ship, led by Matushenko, had nowhere to go. Eventually, they made it to Romania, where they gave up the ship. Matushenko would live for two years in exile, returning to Russia in 1907, where he was arrested and later executed.

FBI Agents Jack Coler and Richard Williams entered the Pine Ridge Reservation to track down a robbery suspect. The Pine Ridge Reservation was not a normal Indian reservation in 1976. Since 1972 and the election of Dick Wilson to the post of President of the Oglala Sioux, there had been open armed conflict on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Most famously, it was the site of the Wounded Knee Incident where Federal authorities supporting Wilson engaged in a standoff with Oglala protesters. Yet the events of June 26, 1976 were of a different beast. As soon as Coler and Williams saw the truck they were looking for, they had massive amounts of rifle fire come on them. After telling dispatch they needed backup, Williams and Coler were quickly killed. Federal agents killed a man named Jimmy Stuntz, who was found wearing Coler's jacket. Eventually, the investigation focused on Leonard Peltier, who was found with a variety of weapons, including those of Williams and Coler. Although Peltier would be found guilty of their murder in a Federal trial, his case would become one of the most celebrated inmates in Federal prison.

Harry K. Thaw murdered Stanford White because, in his words, White had "ruined my wife." Or maybe he said White had "ruined my life." The event that triggered the hate Thaw had for White was the moment some five years previously when White had slept with Evelyn Nesbit without Nesbit realizing it. At the time, the 16 year old Nesbit was the most famous model in America, and her mother thought White was a good influence. As she moved away from White's influence, Nesbit found a variety of admirers while she was pursuing an acting career. The most dangerous was Harry K. Thaw, a sociopathic heir of a Pittsburgh railroad baron. Thaw had been kicked out of the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University for being obnoxious and never attending classes. Finally, he tried to make it in New York's high society circles, but was mainly blocked by Stanford White. Once he became infatuated with Evelyn Nesbit, Harry K. Thaw decided to take her to Paris so he could convince her to marry him. While in France, he learned of her relationship with Stanford White. Then he became enraged. He began treating Nesbit horribly and drove her away. Despite marrying each other in 1905 and moving into Thaw's childhood home. Thaw was still obsessed with Stanford White, however. So he planned to kill him, finally being able to on the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden, a building designed by Stanford White.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union was still, technically speaking, an ally of the United States, Great Britain, and France. Yet in the division of Germany and the City of Berlin into four zones of occupation, it became clear the Soviet Union wanted to control all of Germany and would be threatening to the Allies. Largely, the Soviet Union rested on posturing and bluffing, at least until the Allies introduced a new currency, the Deutschmark, which stabilized the West German economy. The Soviet response was a complete blockade of all rail and barge traffic into Berlin. This made the supplies in West Berlin limited, and the only way in was through air deliveries. Remarkably, the Allies not only began the Berlin airlift, but they turned it into a massive success. Needing to deliver 6,000 tons of goods each day, after two months the Berlin airlift was surpassing that number regularly. By the following Spring, the airlift had survived a tough winter and set new records for deliveries. In the face of such an effort, the Soviet Union decided to back off of its blockade.