Category: Know Your History
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Know Your History: Octavius Catto
I’ll admit. I was not familiar with the story of Octavius Catto – black activist after the Civil War – until I came across his story in an unexpected place: MLB historian John Thorn’s terrific book Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. Catto was very much a renaissance…
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Know Your History: World’s First Commercial Oil Well
In 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, Edwin Drake struck oil, captured it, and established the first commercial oil well in the world. Drake’s well. Here it is in August of 2020: Western Pennsylvania became the oil capital of the world for the next decade. The oil rush was on. Scores of wells dotted the aptly named…
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Thirty Years from Tienanmen Square
June 4, 2019 marks the thirty year anniversary of a dark day in Chinese history – what is known in the west as The Tienanmen Square Massacre. I remember this day very well. I had just graduated from college a month before. I had just gotten married a week after college graduation. We were in…
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Know Your History: Jeannette Rankin
A curious event happened in November 1916. A women was voted into the United States House of Representatives without the aid of one single woman vote. Jeannette Rankin became the first ever congresswoman at the time when women had yet to achieve the right to vote. It’s quite extraordinary, actually. Every once in a while,…
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Know Your History: Progressives vs. Progressives (Part I)
One of the more enlightening assignments my US History students complete each year is the one where half the class researches the progressive movement of the early 20th century and the other half researches the progressive movement of the early 21st century. It’s true. No two progressives of two different time periods are the same.…
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History: Booker T. Washington’s “Up from Slavery”
Booker T. Washington’s autobiography “Up from Slavery” is the classic look at post-slavery, post-Civil War America that is both instructive, surprising, and insightful for our modern society. Washington was a young boy when he received his freedom after the war, and he had the insatiable desire for learning. He would let nothing stop him, no…
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Know Your History: Americans Helping the Viet-Minh in 1945
On July 16, 1945 a group of American OSS officers (Office of Strategic Services – the precursor to the CIA) parachuted into the Viet-Minh HQ in Tan Trao, Tonkin. (Tonkin was the name for northern Vietnam during the French colonial period.) This small group of officers were charged with helping to train the Vietnamese to…
Author Mark W Sasse 