History in Pictures

Winner of the greased pig contest, Oregon 1941.

Date night in Detroit, 1941.

Left: Berthe Morisot, Woman at Her Toilette, 1875.

Right: Grace Kelly in Rear Window, 1954, an Alfred Hitchcock film.

A sharecropper’s home, 1936.

Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel, Lolita, is published in the US.

The novel tells the story of an aging European man who becomes obsessed with and sexually abuses his twelve-year-old step-daughter.

US Marines launch Operation Starlite, a combined arms operation involving air, ground and naval units, in the first major US ground offensive in the Vietnam War.

Orson Welles, age 26, the narrator, producer and director of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).

At twenty-one or twenty-two, so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible.
Which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma (fog).
Forty can't tell twenty about this.
Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty.

New York soldier Calvin Haynes writes to his wife, Lucy, from a Federal encampment in northern Virginia two weeks after fighting at Gettysburg, July 1863:

Dear Wife,
We have had an awful march and a terrible battle.  A great many of our boys were killed or wounded.  We were in the thickest of the fight, making a charge on the Rebs a ½ a mile through a fire of grape and canister.  Our Regiment lost a 100 men in 10 minutes.
[July] 2d in the afternoon was the bloodiest part of the battle.  At 2 p.m. they opened on us with over a 100 cannon.  We lay flat on our faces for 2 hours.  The air was filled with shell bursting in every direction.  The battery that lay in front of us had 55 horses and 80 men killed.
At 4 PM the infantry charged on us with 3 lines of battle.  We were formed in line under a heavy fire and took our position behind a slight breastwork of stones and rails.  (It seemed as they advanced on us that it would be impossible to stop them.)
As soon as they got within range, we poured into them and the cannon opened with grape and canister.  We mowed them down in heaps.  What was left broke and ran, some of them raised a white flag and came into our lines.
That night and the next day they retreated leaving their dead and wounded on the field.  I went over the field.  Such a sight I never wish to see again.  Every conceivable wound that can be thought of was there.
There was so many wounded that it was impossible to attend to all of them.  Some of them laying 48 hours in a drenching rain.
It is beyond the power of men to describe [such] a battlefield.

Arthur Sicard, of Quebec, invented the first snow blower in 1925.

His device, consisting of a scooper, an auger (a giant corkscrew drill) and a big fan, attached to the front of a truck.

David Johnson Kennedy, Entrance to Harbor — Moonlight, 1881.

August 18, 1940: Germany blamed poor weather for yesterday’s lull in air attacks over Britain, warning that earlier raids had been ‘a mere pin prick’ compared to what was to come.

Berlin warned all nations that the seas around Britain were now considered a war zone, noting they had laid mines in British harbors as well as in open sea lanes.

President Roosevelt met with the Canadian prime minister yesterday and reaffirmed his commitment that the US would never stand by and allow the security of Canada to come under threat.

Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential nominee, gave his support to the pending draft bill, assuring its passage through Congress, and said he agreed with Roosevelt that the US should give material aid to Britain.

In a bid to increase security in the Pacific Northwest, the Spokane Chamber of Commerce asked President Roosevelt to obtain permission from Britain to build a road through Canada, connecting the Lower 48 States to Alaska, in return for giving Britain old US Navy vessels.

Sarah Furman Warner Williams made this quilt in New York in 1803.

Its cream-colored background is linen and the appliqued figures are made of English printed cotton.

[Note the depiction of a father, mother, children and dog at the base of the urn.]

1803 was a momentous year for the United States:

….. President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France.

….. The US Supreme Court established the concept of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, giving the court the power to declare executive acts and laws unconstitutional.

But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
     -- W.H. Auden, Lullaby, 1937.