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They built some tough trucks back then! A 1915 GMC truck hauling timber.
06/05/2026

They built some tough trucks back then! A 1915 GMC truck hauling timber.

On the night of June 3, 1781, 26-year-old Jack Jouett was sleeping at his father’s tavern in Louisa County, Virginia, wh...
06/04/2026

On the night of June 3, 1781, 26-year-old Jack Jouett was sleeping at his father’s tavern in Louisa County, Virginia, when he was awakened by the sound of Banastre Tarleton’s British cavalry passing by on the road toward Charlottesville, where the Virginia legislature and Governor Thomas Jefferson had fled after Richmond fell to the British. Suspecting that Tarleton was intent on capturing them, and knowing that the road was undefended, Jouett set out on the 40-mile midnight ride that would make him famous.

Traveling by moonlight and forced to take little-used trails through the woods, Jouett rode all night, racing to Charlottesville and arriving ahead of the hard-riding British cavalry. When he reached Monticello at 4:30 a.m., Jefferson was already working in his garden. Jouett warned the governor and his guests (who included some of the legislators) that Tarleton was coming, then sped off to town to alert the others, including Patrick Henry, Benjamin Harrison, and Richard Henry Lee. Thanks to Jack Jouett, Thomas Jefferson and nearly all of the members of the Virginia General Assembly (as well as wounded General Edward Stevens, who Jouett escorted personally) made it safely out of Charlottesville before Tarleton’s cavalry arrived. Without his warning, it is likely the entire Virginia government would have been captured or killed.

Thanks to Longfellow, nearly everyone remembers Paul Revere. By comparison, Jack Jouett is little known outside of Virginia.

Today is Jack Jouett Day in Virginia, in honor of his heroic ride of June 3-4, 1781.

Here goes to thee, Jack Jouett!
Lord keep thy memory green;
You made the greatest ride, sir,
That ever yet was seen.

The image on the left is an illustration from the book Jack Jouett’s Ride by Gail Haley. The profile rendering on the right is the only known likeness of Jack Jouett and was done by Jack’s son Matthew, who became a well-known portrait artist in Kentucky but unfortunately left us no portrait of his father, perhaps because Jack did not approve of his son’s career choice.

06/03/2026

New York City, 1911.
One man. No shadow. No reflection.
He appeared in 12 photos. Then vanished.
FBI File -1911. Declassified.
#1911

In 1892, on Willapa Bay, Washington, after the sawmill burned and left the town jobless, schoolteacher Martha Jensen too...
06/03/2026

In 1892, on Willapa Bay, Washington, after the sawmill burned and left the town jobless, schoolteacher Martha Jensen took her 8 students digging clams to buy books. The district stopped paying her. The kids stopped coming because they were hungry. So Martha canceled class on Fridays and led them to the tideflats with shovels and coffee cans. They dug horse clams, steamed them over driftwood fires, and sold them to the oyster boats for 2 cents a pound. In 3 months they earned $18.70. She bought 12 McGuffey Readers and a sack of flour. The boys called her “Captain.” She posted on the chalkboard: “We read in the morning. We feed ourselves at noon.” All 8 of those kids graduated. One became a state senator. He said: “She taught us the tide was a library too.”

Born in Nice in 1807, Giuseppe Garibaldi was working as a merchant seaman when he became involved in the Young Italy mov...
06/03/2026

Born in Nice in 1807, Giuseppe Garibaldi was working as a merchant seaman when he became involved in the Young Italy movement, dedicated to creating a unified Italian republic. After participating in a failed uprising in Genoa and being sentenced to death, at age 27 Garibaldi fled to South America. There he led independence movements in Uruguay and Brazil, displaying the charisma, boldness, and military brilliance that would win him fame, before returning to become one of the principal leaders of the Italian unification movement, thus causing him to be called “A Hero of Two Worlds.” His characteristic red shirt and poncho, adopted from the gaucho traditions of South America, became widely imitated and Garibaldi came to be regarded as the world’s leading exemplar of revolutionary nationalism.

Garibali’s exploits are far too numerous to be summarized in a single Dose. The crowning accomplishment of his life was his role in the unification of Italy, culminating in his “Expedition of the Thousand” in a small army under his command wrested Sicily and the southern Italian peninsula from control by the Spanish House of Bourbon.

Garibaldi’s legacy is impressive and far reaching. He is regarded at the greatest of Italian heroes (“the George Washington of Italy”) and his admirers have spanned the political spectrum. Communists considered him to the founder of Italian nationalism and a precursor to fascism, while Socialists and Communists have admired him for his firm stands against clericalism and for political equality. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward offered Garibaldi a commission as major general in the U.S. army (Garibaldi replied that he would accept only if made commanding general of all U.S. forces and be given the power to abolish slavery). Garibaldi’s admirers included Alfred Lord Tennyson, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Abraham Lincoln, and Che Guevara (“The only hero the world has ever needed is called Giuseppe Garibaldi.”). Places named for him span the globe, including places in Canada, the U.S., Brazil, Great Britain, Mexico, Russia, and Australia. When he visited England in 1864, “Garibaldimania” broke out, as immense crowds flocked to see him.

Although he served in the French National Assembly and the Italian Parliament, Garibaldi’s achievements were primarily military, and he never sought political power. After capturing Sicily, he declared himself dictator, but in the name of the King of Italy. Six months later, when his victory there was complete, Garibaldi stepped down as dictator, turned over authority to the king, and retired to his farm.

On June 2, 1882 (144 years ago today) Giuseppe Garibaldi died at age 74, on his farm on the island of Caprera, off the coast of Sardinia. “Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history,” wrote English historian A.J.P. Taylor.

The photo is from 1861.

Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire is a Grade I listed medieval manor house dating to the 13th century, its moated settin...
06/02/2026

Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire is a Grade I listed medieval manor house dating to the 13th century, its moated setting and timber-framed great hall largely unchanged since the Tudor period and considered one of the most evocative examples of a late medieval manor house in England.

During the years of Catholic persecution following the Reformation, the house was used to shelter priests from the authorities, with at least three concealed hiding places built into the fabric of the building, including one ingeniously concealed within the garderobe shaft, allowing priests to escape through the drainage system if the house was raided.

The Ferrers family owned Baddesley Clinton for around five centuries, and it was during their long tenure that the house accumulated much of the Catholic history and secretive character that still defines it today.

In the late 19th century the house became a retreat for a group of four writers, artists and scholars known as the Quartet, who lived and worked there together in an unconventional domestic arrangement that made Baddesley Clinton a quiet centre of Victorian literary and artistic life.

The house was given to the National Trust in 1980 and remains one of the most atmospheric properties in the Midlands, its moat, great hall and hidden spaces offering a remarkably intact glimpse of English domestic life across seven centuries.

Athletes from the USSR, Yugoslavia, and the United States, stereotypically dressed to represent their respective nations...
06/02/2026

Athletes from the USSR, Yugoslavia, and the United States, stereotypically dressed to represent their respective nations, line up together during the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.

On this day in 1919 radical anarchists detonated nine bombs in eight U.S. cities, targeting judges, politicians, an indu...
06/02/2026

On this day in 1919 radical anarchists detonated nine bombs in eight U.S. cities, targeting judges, politicians, an industrialist, an immigration official, and U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The attacks were the continuation of a terror campaign that had begun in April with 36 mail bombs sent to political, business, and law enforcement officials across the country.

The attacks were the work of anarchist Italian immigrants called Galleanists, named after their leader Luigi Galleani. Although no one was killed by the April mail-bombs, one blew the hands off of the housekeeper of Georgia Senator Thomas Hardwick, as she was opening the package.

Although the bombs used in the June attacks were larger and more powerful, none of their targets were killed. The bomb delivered to the home of Attorney General Palmer exploded prematurely, killing the anarchist who set it. Palmer’s next door neighbors Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt narrowly escaped injury in the blast.

Each of the June bombs was accompanied by a note that read: “War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.”

Palmer reacted aggressively to the attacks, creating and empowering a small division within the Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor of the FBI) to track down those responsible and neutralize the radical threat. He put an energetic young lawyer from the Justice Department in charge of the investigations—J. Edgar Hoover.

The first wave of arrests in what came to be known as “the Palmer Raids” occurred in November, when over 200 suspected anarchist radicals were arrested. In December some of those arrested, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, were deported to the Soviet Union aboard a ship that the press called “the Red Ark.”

A larger wave of arrests occurred in January 1920, targeting thousands of suspected anarchists, communists, and other suspected radicals across the country. Although initially strongly supported by the public and Congress, the raids and arrests came under increasing scrutiny and criticism. Although hundreds of those arrested were eventually deported, many of the warrants were found to be illegal and the Palmer Raids came to be regarded as an overreaching abuse of authority.

The photo is of the Washington D.C. home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, following its bombing on June 2, 1919, one hundred seven years ago today.

The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on this day in 1922. Construction of the memorial took over eight years to complete. ...
06/02/2026

The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on this day in 1922. Construction of the memorial took over eight years to complete. At a cost of $3 million (about $59 million in today’s money), it was the most expensive monument in America to that point.

The ceremony was attended by over 50,000 people and was broadcast nationwide by radio (then a relatively new medium). The keynote address was delivered by Robert Russa Moton, president of Tuskegee Institute. Moton had been required to edit his remarks to make them less provocative, and the black and white attendees (other than Civil War veterans) were seated in separate, segregated sections.

After Morton’s speech, Edwin Markham read his poem “Lincoln, The Man of the People” and the Marine Corps Band performed “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Chief Justice (and former U.S. president) William Howard Taft, president of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, then formally turned the memorial over to President Warren G. Harding. In accepting the monument on behalf of the federal government, Harding concluded by remarks by saying, “Fifty-seven years ago this people gave from their ranks, sprung from their own fiber, this plain man, holding their common ideals. They gave him first to service of the nation in the hour of peril, then to their pantheon of fame. With them and by them he is enshrined and exalted forever. Today American gratitude, love and appreciation, give to Abraham Lincoln this lone white temple, a pantheon for him alone.”

Architect Henry Bacon’s design for the memorial is modeled on the Parthenon in Athens, although whereas the Parthenon has 46 exterior columns, the Lincoln Memorial has 36 (representing the 36 states of the Union during Lincoln's presidency). The seated statue of Lincoln inside the memorial is by sculptor Daniel Chester French and the murals are by Jules Guerin. Flanking the statue are inscriptions of the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Inscribed on the wall above Lincoln’s head are the words: “In this temple, as in the hearts of those for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

The photo is from the 1922 dedication ceremony.

Walt Whitman is now regarded as one of the greatest American poets. But his road to literary fame was not smooth and his...
06/01/2026

Walt Whitman is now regarded as one of the greatest American poets. But his road to literary fame was not smooth and his work did not meet with universal acclaim during his lifetime.

The second oldest of eight children, Walt dropped out of school at age 11 to take a job as an office boy to help support his struggling family. Throughout his life he would work as a printer, a clerk, a teacher, and a journalist, while reading voraciously and writing poems.

At age 30 he began writing Leaves of Grass, the collection of poetry that would make him famous, self-publishing it in June 1855. Although the poems received high praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declared Leaves of Grass to be “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed,” the overall reception was far less effusive, with many readers put off by Whitman’s style, his self-presentation, and by what was then regarded as a vulgar openness about sexuality. Over his lifetime, Whitman republished Leaves of Grass in numerous editions, so that it eventually grew from 12 poems to over 400.

During the Civil War Whitman worked as a clerk in Washington DC and as a volunteer nurse, and he was deeply moved by the suffering he witnessed. In May 1865 he published Drum Taps, a collection of poems inspired by the war. In November he published what would be his most popular poem during his lifetime—“O Captain! My Captain!,” an elegy for Abraham Lincoln .

Whitman suffered a serious stroke in 1873, after which he moved in with his brother in Camden, New Jersey. In 1882 he made enough money from the sale of his books to buy a modest house of his own in Camden and he would live there until his death in 1892 at age 72.

Walter “Walt” Whitman Jr. was born in Huntington, New York on May 31, 1819, two hundred seven years ago today. He was, according to the Poetry Foundation, “the first writer of a truly American poetry.”

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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