Left: Moore’s House, near Yorktown, Virginia, in 1862. The final battle of the Revolutionary War took place in fields adjacent to this house in 1781, and the terms of British Gen. Cornwallis’s surrender to George Washington were negotiated inside. In 1862, artillery shells from Union and Confederate forces flew over this house as Gen. George McClellan laid seige on Confederate forces in Yorktown. The heavy Union artillery barrage forced the Confederates to evacuate Yorktown in May 1862. Right: a 200 pound Parrott gun in the Union battery.
Left: Confederate soldiers repulse repeated Union frontal assaults from defensive positions behind a stone wall and the bluff, called Marye’s Heights, located to its rear, enabling the Confederate force to claim victory in the first Battle of Fredericksburg, December 1862. Right: Confederate dead lay behind the stone wall of Marye's Heights, often called the Sunken Road, on May 3, 1863, twenty minutes after losing to Union forces in the second Battle of Fredericksburg. The Confederate loss is considered a turning point in the Civil War.
Left: Ford’s Theatre advertisement for the November 9, 1863, performance of “The Marble Heart” starring actor John Wilkes Booth. President Lincoln attended this performance of the play. Right: A contemporaneous drawing of Booth jumping to the stage after shooting Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.
In 1902, French film director Georges Méliès produced “A Trip to the Moon,” a science fiction adventure which tells the story of astronomers who travel to the Moon’s surface in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the lunar surface, escape from an underground group of lunar inhabitants called “Selenites,” and then return to the Earth with a captive Selenite. Above, stills from the hand-colored film. Below, left: the Soviet spacecraft Luna 2, which became the first spacecraft to reach the Moon’s surface on September 14, 1959. Luna 2 inpacted the Moon’s surface 160 miles from the site where Apollo 15 would land twelve years later. Below, right: NASA astronaut James Irwin of Apollo 15 salutes the flag on August 2, 1971.
Left: A 1911 Detroit Electric car. [Jim Heaphy photo]. Several companies in Europe and the US produced electric vehicles in the early 1900s. They were marketed as ‘a woman’s vehicle’ because they didn’t require the hand-cranking needed to start early combustion engines. Among the more successful were vehicles made by Detroit Electric, which could travel about 80 — 100 miles on a single charge, reaching speeds of 20 MPH. Improvements in the internal combustion engine caused electric vehicles to lose favor. Right: Tesla Model Y [Lekhaki photo]. In 2023, the Tesla Model Y became the world's best-selling vehicle for the year with 1.2 million cars delivered, becoming the first electric vehicle to top auto sales charts.
Left: Vietnamese communist Viet Minh troops, under the political leadership of Ho Chi Minh, plant their flag over the captured French headquarters at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, on May 7, 1954. France’s defeat there led to the 1954 Geneva Accords, which divided Vietnam into North and South along the 17th parallel and France’s loss of its Indochina colonies. The US had provided financial support to the French and the French loss exaccerbated US fears that Communism would spread throughout the region. Right: President Eisenhower espouses the “domino theory” at an April 1954 news conference as beleaguered French forces face imminent defeat in Dien Bien Phu. The domino theory became the core rationale for the twenty-year US involvement in Vietnam.
Left: Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest of Theodore Roosevelt’s six children, stands in front of his aircraft in France, 1918. Quentin was killed in a dogfight with German fighter aircraft over the Marne River on July 14, 1918, and was initially buried where he fell. Right: Quentin’s older brother Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., age 56, who directed the D-Day landings on Utah Beach, June 6, 1944. Theodore, Jr., died in northern France of a heart attack six weeks later and was buried in Normandy’s American cemetery. Quentin’s body was moved to lay next to his older brother’s.
Left: Soviet troops behind Soviet T-34 tanks attack advancing German forces near Kursk, in present-day Ukraine, in the largest tank battle in history, July 12, 1943. Right: Russian tank column destroyed in Bucha, Ukraine, Feb. 27, 2022.
Two days before Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, the BBC shut down its television service to its twenty thousand TV customers. Its final broadcast, shown at noon on September 1, 1939, was Disney’s cartoon, "Mickey’s Gala Premier," a 1933 spoof on Hollywood celebrities. It would be nearly seven years before British television service was restored. That happened on June 7, 1946, with the broadcast of the same Mickey Mouse cartoon.
