Top: In 1958, Leonard Bernstein became a household name, launching with CBS Television the first of fourteen seasons of Young Peoples’ Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. Bottom left: John Lennon, center, with his first band, The Quarrymen, June 1957. Bottom right: Paul McCartney joined the band in late 1957 and George Harrison joined in 1958. They would perform as The Beatles on US television, on The Ed Sullivan Show, in February 1964.
Left: Gen. U.S. Grant’s favorite horse, “Jeff Davis,” who was taken during the 1863 siege of Vicksburg from the Confederate president’s brother, Joe, a Mississippi plantation owner. Grant: “This animal exceeds in endurance any horseflesh I ever saw. I have taken him out at daylight and kept in the saddle ‘til dark, and he came in as fresh when I dismounted as when we started in the morning. There isn’t [enough] gold in America to buy him.” Right: Lincoln’s horse, “Old Bob,” dressed in mourning on the day of Lincoln’s Springfield funeral, May 4, 1865.
While Texas ranchers fought in the Civil War, their cattle herds scattered and they lost their slave labor force. After the war, these ranchers hired cowboys to round up their maverick cattle and drive herds north, to shipping points in Kansas, Colorado and Missouri, to capitalize on a surging Northern demand for beef. The cowboy era ended around 1895 when barbed wire became widely available and Western railroad lines became extensive. Famed cowboy photographer Erwin Smith took these photos in 1908.
Hundreds of American newspapers carried combat journalist Ernie Pyle’s reports from Europe and Asia on the struggles of the ordinary foot soldier during WWII. Pyle's purpose was to explain the war to the folks back home. Here is Pyle's description of a front line soldier: “A soldier who has been a long time in the line does have a 'look' in his eyes that anyone who knows about it can discern. It’s a look of dullness, eyes that look without seeing, eyes that see without conveying any image to the mind. It’s a look that is the display room for what lies behind it—exhaustion, lack of sleep, tension for too long, weariness that is too great, fear beyond fear, misery to the point of numbness, a look of surpassing indifference to anything anybody can do. It’s a look I dread to see on men.”
The Fulton surface-to-air recovery system, sometimes called the “Skyhook,” uses a harness and self-inflating balloon with an attached lift line to allow fixed-wing aircraft to retrieve materials and personnel without landing. The two US servicemen seated on the right used Skyhook in May 1962 to recover Soviet data and equipment from a drifting Arctic ice station that had been hurriedly abandoned due to shifting ice.
Left: President Franklin D. Roosevelt leans on the arm of his son, James, enabling him to stand despite his infirmity. Time Magazine labeled James the “Assistant President of the United States.” Six months before the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR sent James on a secret, round-the-world diplomatic mission to assure various governments that the US would soon join the war against the Axis Powers. Right: James sits next to his father as he delivers his “Day of Infamy” speech on Dec. 8, 1941, following the Pearl Harbor attack. Roosevelt served as a combat Marine in the Pacific during the war.
The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, which was intended to end the Vietnam War, led to the release of 591 Americans whom the North Vietnamese had held captive. Left: American POWs line up for bus transport out of Hanoi. Right: former POWs on board a US aircraft. Since 1973, the remains of more than 1,000 Americans killed during the war have been identified and repatriated. Nearly 1,600 Americans are still unaccounted-for. Hundreds of these men have been classified as “non-recoverable” after a rigorous Defense Department investigation. [Perspective: more than 72,000 Americans who served during WWII remain unaccounted-for.]
Johnny Carson joined the Navy in 1943, at age 18, and served as a communications officer on board a battleship. He was en route to a Pacific combat zone when the war ended. Ten years later, Carson was a writer for the Red Skelton TV show and hosted a five-minute TV talk show on a local Los Angeles television station twice a week. Carson began his seventeen year run as the host of the Tonight show in 1962. Right: Skelton and Carson on Carson’s Coffee Break.
