The Right Side of History

Plus: join our 100-days chat!

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.

Before we get going, a few notes of housekeeping:

• You might notice an episode from a different show in the feed today — it's part of a cross-promotion experiment we're doing with a podcast marketing company (this brings in some helpful revenue too). A few listeners suggested it’d be useful to hear from me (Jody) up top to explain why it’s there — we’ve passed that feedback along to the company, and are still tweaking the partnership. Podcast marketing is tricky, the revenue helps, and we're in experiment mode. We always appreciate the feedback!

• This Saturday morning, we’re going to record a special “Trump’s First 100 Days” episode to run as Sunday’s “Sunday Context” episode. If you have any thoughts, we’ve opened up the chat for comments, questions, and suggestions. Hop in!

Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American political history…

April 24

• 1898: Spain declares war on the United States after rejecting America's ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba

• 1945: President Harry Truman is briefed on the Manhattan Project's attempts to create an atomic bomb

• 1951: Black students at Robert Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia have walked out of school, staging a strike over poor conditions at their school, particularly when compared to the white school across town

• 1980: Operation Eagle Claw, an ill-fated military operation to rescue the 52 American hostages held in Tehran ends with eight U.S. servicemen dead and no hostages rescued

April 25

• 1777: Sybil Ludington, 16, rides to warn Connecticut colonists of the British advance

• 1947: President Harry Truman officially opens the first White House bowling alley

• 1983: The Soviet Union releases a letter that Russian leader Yuri Andropov wrote to Samantha Smith, an American fifth-grader from Manchester, Maine, inviting her to visit his country.

• 2019: Joe Biden announces his campaign for the presidency

April 26

• 1865: John Wilkes Booth is killed by Union Soldiers at a Virginia farm, 12 days after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln

• 1878 : A verdict is delivered in a suit brought by the formerly-enslaved woman Henrietta Wood. She sued her former enslaver Zebulon Ward for reparations — and an all-white jury sided with her

• 1954: The Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia

• 1986: The world’s worst nuclear power plant accident occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union

April 27

• 1773: The British Parliament passes the Tea Act, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company

• 1805: U.S. agent William Eaton leads U.S. forces “to the shores of Tripoli,” on a mission to depose Yusuf Karamanli, the ruling pasha of Tripoli.

• 1813: American troops capture York, the capital of Upper Canada, in the Battle of York (now Toronto)

• 1996: President Bill Clinton gave 4 1/2 hours of videotaped testimony as a defense witness in the criminal trial of his former Whitewater business partners.

• 2004: A report aired on 60 Minutes featuring reports and photos of abuse by American troops at the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib.

April 28

• 1942: Nightly "dim-outs" begins along the East Coast

• 1952: Dwight D. Eisenhower resigns as Supreme Commander of NATO

• 1994: Former CIA official Aldrich Ames, who had betrayed U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union and then Russia, pleads guilty to espionage and tax evasion and is sentenced to life in prison without parole

April 29

• 1854: The first college founded solely for African-American students, Ashmun Institute (now Lincoln University), opens its doors

• 1861: Maryland's House of Delegates votes not to secede from the Union

• 1967: Muhammad Ali is stripped of his boxing title after refusing induction into the United States Army

• 2004: The WWII Monument opens in DC

April 30

• 1803: Chancellor Robert Livingston and James Monroe sign the Louisiana Purchase Treaty in Paris at a cost of 15 million dollars, doubling the size of the U.S.

• 1989: The World Wide Web (WWW) is first launched in the public domain by CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee

• 1994 : An 18-year-old American named Michael Fay is awaiting his punishment in Singapore for acts of vandalism. That punishment included caning, which caused a media and diplomatic firestorm in the United States.

In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more.

It’s 1770s season, folks. You may have noticed two Revolution-era stories in our feed recently — first on the Battle of Menotomy, the often-forgotten third battle that took place on the same day as Lexington and Concord; and today, the tale of the only attack on British soil by America in the Revolutionary War, led by a misguided John Paul Jones. And in the digest above, you can see our episode about Sybil Ludington, who galloped through Connecticut in the spring of 1777, warning of advancing British troops… a younger, cooler Paul Revere.

It is, of course, 250 years since 1775, when the war kicked off. Lots of anniversaries and epic tales in the air. Next year all this kind of stuff will go into even higher gear, as America celebrates its semi-quincentennial (I’m practicing how to say that). Get ready for a lot of spin.

I, for one, am already finding the 250th a great ocassion to do some deep thinking about this little experiment in democracy we’ve got going on here. Even the few episodes we’ve done in recent weeks make me realize that history is made by real people, fallable people, often semi-incompetent people; who still rise to the ocassion because they believe in something bigger than themselves. Of course, that’s a story that everyone tells themselves; everyone thinks that their side is the righteous one. But every once in a while, you can be on the right side — and the right side of history. I still believe it’s possible.

A Note from Scotland

• Thanks to listener Laura, who wrote in from Scotland in response to our recent John Paul Jones episode to say: “While it was an excellent attempt at pronouncing Kirkcudbright Harbour, it should be pronounced Kirk-Coo-Bree, not Kirk-Coo-Bright. Close but no cigar! Plenty of history relating to John Paul Jones in the area and, further along the coast at Garlieston some more recent Scottish-US historical links in the form of the Mulberry Harbours test site at Garlieston used to train soldiers in preparation for the D-Day landings.” A topic for a future show for sure!

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