The Great Span
How will history remember this week?
Welcome back to the This Day newsletter. Each week, a member of our team gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
Below, a fascinating list of historical moments that took place this week — but first a rundown of some historical thoughts from a member of our team. Today, host Jody Avirgan…
One thing I’m reminded of this week:
I’m spending a lot of time thinking about America’s upcoming 250th birthday. In part because we have a big year-long series planned1 and also because I’ve been obsessed with what Jason Kottke calls “The Great Span.” 250 years, it’s really not that long. To wit: just this past weekend, President John Tyler’s (1841-1845) last living grandson died. This past weekend. The last person collecting a Civil War pension died just a couple years ago. All around us, there are people whose grandparents grew up in a time before electricity, cars, planes… The long-ago past is right there, whispering in our ear. You can reach out and touch it. Yet, somehow, at the same time, my daughter recently referred to “Karate Kid” as movie that “came out in the 19-somethings.” Funny how time works.
One thing I learned this week:
My favorite This Day episodes are the ones where not only do I learn something new, but find myself connecting some historical dots in real time. The episode we did this week on the resistance to Indian Removal Act was one of those. Over the course of the conversation, I really came to see how this fight, in the 1830s, was a bit of a staging ground for the abolition battles that would come to a head just a generation later. And a lesson that, as I put it, “morality is a muscle.” One of our favorite episodes we’ve done in a good long while - check it out if you haven’t.
One thing history will remember this week:
I’ve stopped trying to predict what current news stories will make the history books (brain chips?) fifty years from now. And actually, I’m more and more convinced that there’s a general slowdown taking place of ideas, cultural shifts, and political arguments. Will Leitch touched on this in his NYT piece: “I Can’t Believe We’re Still Arguing About This”
One other thing I want to say this week:
At a dinner party this past weekend, I got into a conversation about when “the timeline jumped” — you know, when exactly did normal reality get bumped into… whatever this is. My theory has always been: When the Cubs won the 2016 World Series. Ever since, the real world has been crap, but sports have been amazing. As evidenced by The Ringers list of 100 sports moments of the quarter century. Discuss.
Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…
May 29
1790: Rhode Island—finally—ratifies the constitution, the last of the original 13 states to do so.
1812: DeWitt Clinton is nominated by the Democratic-Republicans for President, in what would be the closest race to date.
1846: 13 years after being granted their freedom, a group of formerly-enslaved Virginians arrive in Ohio to settle on land that they’d secured in a long court battle
1917: John F. Kennedy is born.
1973: Tom Bradley is elected the first Black mayor of Los Angeles, California
May 30
1806: Future U.S. President Andrew Jackson kills Charles Dickinson in a duel.
1868: "Decoration Day," later called Memorial Day, is first observed in Northern U.S. states
1883: A stampede on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City kills twelve people after a rumour spread the bridge was going to collapse
1921 : The day before a white mob descended on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, burning hundreds of buildings to the ground in what was known as “Black Wall Street.”
1979 : A Manhattan 6-year-old by the name of Etan Patz goes missing on his two-block walk to the bus stop
2008: U.S. Democratic nominee Barack Obama asks Joe Biden to play a more prominent role in his campaign
2010: Former BP executive Tony Hayward's offers his infamous "I'd like my life back" comment following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
May 31
1889: The Johnstown Flood kills 2,209 people and wipes out a city after the South Fork Dam burst
1909: The National Negro Committee, forerunner to the NAACP, convenes for the first time
1988: Ronald Reagan speaks to Moscow University students about his desire to see the Berlin Wall taken down
2005: Vanity Fair reveals that Mark Felt was "Deep Throat."
June 1
1812: President James Madison asks Congress to declare war on the United Kingdom, marking the start of the War of 1812
1863: Harriet Tubman leads Union soldiers on a nighttime to free some 700 enslaved people in South Carolina
1916: Louis Brandeis becomes the first Jew appointed to the United States Supreme Court
1950: Margaret Smith denounces Senator Joseph McCarthy's tactics with her Declaration of Conscience, challenging the rise of McCarthyism
1980: CNN launches, revolutionizing the television news industry
1990: George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev sign a treaty to end chemical weapon production, contributing to disarmament efforts
June 2
1862: Robert E. Lee takes command of Confederate armies of North Virginia during the American Civil War
1865: Edmund Kirby Smith, the last Confederate general with a major field force, surrenders at Galveston before fleeing to Mexico (as other Confederates had done)
1919: Attorney General Alexander Palmer's house is damaged in an anarchist bombing, in-part triggering the so-called Palmer Raids
1924: President Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act, granting Native Americans American citizenship
1957: Face the Nation interviews Nikita Khrushchev, providing a rare glimpse into the Soviet leader's thoughts during the Cold War
1989: 10,000 Chinese soldiers are blocked by 100,000 citizens in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, protecting students demonstrating for democracy
1993 : The very-fake nation known as “The Dominion Of Melchizedek” received official recognition from the Central African Republic. The Dominion was a nation set up to commit bank fraud, but now it was formally recognized as a sovereign state
June 3
1943: The LA Zoot Suit Riots begin, a conflict between U.S. servicemen and Mexican American youths
1980: An explosive device is detonated at the base of the Statue of Liberty
2013: The trial of Chelsea Manning for leaking classified material to WikiLeaks begins
June 4
1872: Prospectors Philip Arnold and John Slack convince financiers of a potential diamond deposit in Montana, sparking a brief prospecting craze for the gems across the western US
1892: Secretary of State James G. Blaine resigns his post to challenge incumbent president Benjamin Harrison at the upcoming Republican National Convention
1919: The Senate passes the Nineteenth Amendment
1945: The United States, Soviet Union, Britain, and France agree to divide up occupied Germany in the post-World War II era, setting the stage for the Cold War
1972: Shirley Chisholm appears as the first woman on a presidential debate stage. She was also the first African-American woman elected to Congress.
1994 : Disgraced former National Security Council advisor Oliver North wins the GOP primary for the Virginia Senate race. He would go on to lose in an extremely close election
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