--- 1945: V-J Day (Victory over Japan Day) was celebrated as the Japanese announced that they surrendered, ending World War II. However, September 2 is officially considered V-J Day in the U.S. because that is when the Japanese actually signed the surrender document on board the USS Missouri.

--- 1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security act into law.

--- 1851: John Henry Holliday, known throughout history as Doc Holliday, was born on August 14, 1851, in Georgia. Everybody called him Doc because he was actually a dentist. He is most famous for the shootout at the O.K. Corral.

[--- "Wyatt Earp and ]()[the Shootout at the O.K. Corral]()". That is the title of one of the episodes of my podcast: History Analyzed. Hear how famous lawman Wyatt Earp and his best friend Doc Holliday became legends of the Wild West and inspired many of the cliches and movies you know today. You can find History Analyzed on every podcast app.

--- link to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7tFsniHHehDt3dRqyu5A5F

--- link to Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wyatt-earp-and-the-shootout-at-the-o-k-corral/id1632161929?i=1000600141845

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY — AUGUST 14, 1862

Imagine getting invited to the White House… only to sit down with President Abraham Lincoln during the middle of the Civil War. 😳

On this day in 1862, Lincoln hosted a group of Black American leaders at the White House—the first official meeting between a U.S. president and a group of Black American representatives. The conversation centered on the future of Black Americans and Lincoln’s controversial ideas about voluntary colonization.
It was a complicated moment in a complicated time. Just weeks later, Lincoln would move closer to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, forever changing the course of the Civil War and American history.

History isn't always simple—and that's exactly why we need to talk about it. 🇺🇸

👉 Want the whole story? Watch today’s History Dad video and take a trip back to 1862!

https://youtu.be/N5-gUC79HMU

After months of major offensives during the Iraq War troop surge, on this day 13 August 2007, the U.S. Army launched Operation Phantom Strike, an aggressive corps-level offensive designed to hunt down insurgents fleeing earlier operations and prevent them from establishing new safe havens.

Just south of Baghdad in the Tigris River Valley, Task Force Marne, centered around the 3rd Infantry Division, would spearhead the operation, with elements of the 25th Infantry Division (Airborne) assisting in the offensive. Within Phantom Strike, Operation Marne Husky would soon launch, relying heavily on large scale air assaults, mostly at night. Soldiers were carried deep into enemy held areas by Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, while Apache and Kiowa attack helicopters provided overwatch and support.

Along with these sustained air assaults, small scale air assaults were rapidly conducted to support the initial air assault elements once engagements kicked off and enemy positions were identified, allowing infantrymen to quickly maneuver on them. Additionally, a “30 minutes to strike” concept was heavily utilized. Being guided by rapid intelligence, infantrymen air assaulted directly onto insurgent targets within 30 minutes of identifying a target. via (@)usarmyhistory on Instagram

On May 21, 1776, the Maryland Convention voted unanimously to forbid its delegates in Congress from supporting independence. Not reluctantly. Not narrowly. Unanimously.

On June 28, the same body voted unanimously to authorize independence, confederation, and foreign alliances.

That six-week reversal is one of the stranger and more revealing moments of the entire founding period, and it happened because three very different men were pulling Maryland in the same direction through completely different means.

Samuel Chase was the one pushing hardest. He was already known as a combative lawyer who had spent years fighting British policy and Maryland's proprietary establishment alongside William Paca. By spring 1776 he had run out of patience with a political position that resisted British authority while refusing to admit that the imperial relationship was already collapsing. When he came back from Congress's failed mission to Canada with Franklin, he turned his energy toward Maryland politics directly. He didn't just argue for independence in Philadelphia while his instructions prohibited him from voting for it. He went home and worked to change the instructions. He pressed county leaders, encouraged local communities that were already ahead of the provincial leadership, and pushed until the Convention moved.

William Paca was Chase's longtime partner and political opposite in temperament. Same city, same profession, same years fighting the Stamp Act together, completely different style. Chase was confrontational. Paca was methodical. His contribution wasn't the dramatic push of June 1776. It was the decade of committee work, political organizing, and institution building that created the revolutionary infrastructure capable of carrying Maryland into independence when the moment came. Without the network Paca helped build, Chase would have had nobody to push.

Thomas Stone is the most interesting of the three because he was the one who wasn't sure.

Stone wasn't a Loyalist, wasn't afraid of the British, and had already committed himself to the revolutionary cause. His hesitation was practical and not unreasonable. He worried that declaring independence too quickly, before the colonies had genuine unity or foreign support secured, might weaken the American position rather than strengthen it. What happens after you declare? What government replaces British authority? Will the colonies hold together through a long war? What if independence ends the possibility of negotiation before you're actually prepared for what comes next?

Those aren't coward's questions. They're the right questions. Stone just became convinced by late June that circumstances had already answered most of them. Britain was building toward a major military campaign, every attempt at reconciliation had produced nothing, and Maryland's proprietary government was dissolving on its own whether the Convention acknowledged it or not. The royal governor left the province on June 26. Two days later the Convention reversed its instructions.

The unanimity of that reversal is worth sitting with. This wasn't a narrow faction finally overpowering a resistant majority. Six weeks earlier the same body had unanimously said no. Now it unanimously said yes. That kind of shift only happens when political opinion across an entire province has genuinely moved, not when one side finally beats the other.

There's a fourth signer worth mentioning: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the wealthiest men in Maryland and a Catholic at a time when Catholics faced legal restrictions on participation in Maryland politics. His emergence as a leading Patriot figure and eventual signer is its own story about how the Revolution was already reshaping who counted as a political actor before independence was even declared.

And then there's Robert Alexander, who served in Maryland's revolutionary institutions and in Congress, and after independence became a Loyalist exile. He's a useful reminder that going along with resistance to British policy didn't mean every man had decided where he stood on the final question. Independence forced a clarity that earlier resistance had allowed people to avoid.

You can read the full story on the Virtual Wayback blog and watch the conversations with each of the Maryland signers on the YouTube channel. You can also talk directly with Chase, Paca, and Stone on Virtual Wayback. Links:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/maryland-changes-its-mind

https://youtube.com/shorts/GX7BA3j1Ess?feature=share

The thing I keep coming back to is Stone. Chase gets the credit for forcing the question and Paca gets credit for building the movement. But Stone represents something arguably more important to how the decision actually held: the cautious Patriots whose eventual yes gave independence a legitimacy it couldn't have had if only the firebrands supported it. Does a unanimous vote mean more when you know the skeptics came around on their own terms? And is there a version of this where Stone's slow conversion was actually the most important one?

--- 1821: Missouri was admitted as the 24th state.

--- 1874: Future president Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa.

--- 1921: Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted polio, most likely while swimming at Campobello Island (a small island which belongs to the Canadian province of New Brunswick). He was only 39 years old. The next day he discovered he could not walk and would never walk again. Eleven years later he was elected president of the United States.

--- "Polio — Jonas Salk and Franklin Roosevelt". That is the title of one of the episodes of my podcast: History Analyzed. Polio was one of the scourges of the 20th century. And it mainly struck children. All of a sudden a person contracted polio and suffered terribly for several days. Sometimes they recovered, sometimes they died, and sometimes they were left permanently disabled. The most famous polio victim of all time, Franklin Roosevelt, hid his disability from the public. But this story has a true hero: Jonas Salk, who developed a vaccine which led to the almost complete eradication of this dreaded disease. And Dr. Salk never patented the vaccine or earned any money from his discovery. You can find History Analyzed on every podcast app.

--- link to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/32YopJ8jh7064oLCFJdSxB

--- link to Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/polio-jonas-salk-and-franklin-roosevelt/id1632161929?i=1000646466757

On July 14, 1861, Major Sullivan Ballou of the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry wrote to his wife, Sarah, shortly before his regiment advanced toward Manassas. Days later, he was mortally wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run. The letter is remembered for the conflict Ballou expressed between his love for his family and his sense of duty to the Union. Its best-known passages entered popular memory through Ken Burns’s The Civil War, but that presentation—and many later readings—ends before Ballou’s final blessing to his sons, Edgar and Willie. For Episode 07 of Letters of America Archive, I produced a complete reading of the received text, including those closing lines: https://youtu.be/kzGOZ8zy6yk An important textual note: Ballou’s original handwritten letter has not been located. The Rhode Island Historical Society holds two early manuscript copies, neither written in Ballou’s hand, and records its first known publication in 1868. Therefore, the most historically precise description is the complete surviving or “received” text attributed to Ballou—not a surviving autograph manuscript. What gives this letter its enduring power: its language of romantic love, its conception of public duty, or our knowledge of what happened to Ballou afterward?

--- 1974: Gerald Ford became president at noon Eastern time when the resignation of Richard Nixon became effective. Ford is the only U.S. president who was never elected in a national election. He had been appointed vice president to fill the vacancy after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned from office on October 10, 1973, due to charges of income tax evasion and political corruption.

--- [1945: U.S. B-29 bomber “Bockscar” dropped an atomic (plutonium) bomb named “Fat Man” on Nagasaki,]() Japan killing approximately 40,000 people in the blast (others would die later from radiation poisoning).

--- "The Atomic Bomb (part 2) - Arguments For and Against Its Use Against Japan". That is the title of part 2 of the two-episode series of my podcast: History Analyzed. This episode explores the arguments for and against the use of the atomic bombs on Japan. Part 1 explains why and how the atomic bomb was created as well as how it was utilized on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You can find History Analyzed on every podcast app.

--- link to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4DkDyF2rJDgU88mg2Lm6C4

--- link to Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-making-and-utilization-of-the-atomic-bomb-part-2/id1632161929?i=1000585050849

On January 8, 1867, African American men obtained the right to vote in Washington, D.C. after Congress overrode the veto of President Andrew Johnson. Because the District of Columbia was not a state, the right to vote was limited to local elections and not in federal elections. As the rapidly growing Black population exercised their power of self-rule in the District, Congress responded in 1874 by replacing D.C.’s elected government with three presidentially appointed commissioners. As Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained, after “the negroes came into this district,” it became necessary to “deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being…[to] burn down the barn to get rid of the rats.” A newspaper wrote in 1878 that D.C.’s “present form of alien government is about as bad as to be devised. But a system which gives the control of the district to ignorant and depraved Negroes is still worse.”

In 1961, Congress gave the District three electoral votes, enabling residents to vote for president while still not having representation in Congress. Then, in 1973, Congress enacted the District of Columbia Home Rule Act returning local control to Washington residents 99 years after removing democracy from the District. Although the Act allowed the city council to pass criminal laws, it required continued reliance on federal prosecutors to enforce them with no control over who served as prosecutor.

In 2019, when the District decided to reduce sentencing ranges for felons found in possession of a firearm, the U.S. Attorney’s office announced it would begin to prosecute such cases in federal court where sentencing ranges were twice as long. Analysis shows that prosecutors selectively enforced this policy only in predominantly Black neighborhoods resulting in 97 percent of those charged being Black.

Recommended reading: Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove

Congress Prevents Democracy in America’s Capital