Today in History: Nov. 11

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is Veterans Day. It was established to honor the date World War I ended in 1918: “at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” or 11:00 a.m. on 11/11. It celebrates all who have served, in any era, in any of the services. (Photo at top is my great-uncle’s grave in France.)

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World War I ended on this date in 1918. The total number killed in the four years of war: 11 million military personnel and seven million civilians. Fighting took place in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia. Sea battles were fought in the Mediterranean Sea and on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The 1918 flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million individuals that year was helped in its deadly course by the conflict.
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When Will Shawkan Be Freed?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A journalist’s job is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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On the good days, the dozen prisoners negotiate their way through the impossibility of the circumstances. The bad days are simply more impossible, because even impossible situations can be made worse.

The prisoners are crowded in a space the size of a child’s bedroom, nine feet by twelve feet, which for obvious reasons does not have cots for all twelve occupants. They take turns sleeping on the cot or on spaces on the floor. A sink and toilet sit open against one wall. The prisoners take turns cooking on a two-plate electric cooker, which during the winter months has served as the unheated prison cell’s heat source.

The sky, the only way to know if it is day or night, is seen through a small gap in the iron bars in the ceiling of the cell. One prisoner wrote in 2014:
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Today in History: Nov. 10

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Sir Henry Morton Stanley, an explorer and journalist, was given the job of covering the Middle East and Africa for the New York Herald, an assignment which included a possible adventure: a Scottish missionary named David Livingstone had launched a search for the source of the Nile River in 1866 and no one had heard from him since. It was 1870.

On this date in 1871, near Lake Tanganyika, after an eight-month journey, the journalist found his story and his man. In his book about the encounter Sir Henry reports that he hailed the missionary with this sentence: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” but he destroyed the pages in his diary about the encounter so it is not known if this most famous greeting ever was uttered in real life. Dr. Livingstone made no mention of it in his memoirs, either.
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