Today in History: Nov. 13

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories, a collection by Joseph Conrad, was published on this date in 1902 by William Blackwood & Sons. One of the “two other stories” in the title is a novella Blackwood’s Magazine had published in three parts in 1899: Heart of Darkness.

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Walt Disney’s film Fantasia opened in movie theaters on this date in 1940. One sequence, set to Claude DeBussy’s “Clair de Lune,” was finished but cut at the last moment to shorten the movie. Here it is (after the jump):
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Today in History: Nov. 12

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

American Airlines Flight 587 crashed soon after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport 15 years ago today. Two-hundred-fifty-one passengers, nine crew, and five people on the ground in the Belle Harbor area of Queens died.

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The Ellis Island Immigrant Station (photo at top) was closed as a processing center on this date in 1954.
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On Veterans Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Their life consisted wholly and solely of war, for they were and always had been front-line infantrymen. They survived because the fates were kind to them, certainly—but also because they had become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation.”—Ernie Pyle, World War II journalist, writing about what he saw at the front. Killed in action April 18, 1945.

I do not come from a family that talks much about its military service. My father was drafted in 1958, served his two-year-long tour, and then came back home to a job that had been held for him. This was during the Cold War, so he did not see action but he did see more of the world than he had up till then, or since. He served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Cold War as a calculator tasked with determining missile flight paths. (I believe he worked with the Atlas missile, an early ICBM model.)
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