On this day in 1945, a soldier is presented with a Medal of Honor. Paul J. Wiedorfer had charged through snow and ice on Christmas Day during the Battle of the Bulge. It should have been a suicidal run, but he’d survived his fearless charge relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, serious wounds came several weeks later, during a different conflict. Wiedorfer learned that he was to receive the Medal of Honor as he recuperated in a hospital. “Hey, Paul,” a fellow patient asked as he browsed through

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On this day in 1775, the “shot heard round the world” occurs at Lexington Green! It had been mere hours since Paul Revere ended his famous ride from Boston to Lexington (see previous post). Seven hundred British soldiers were en route to Concord. Their goal? They wanted to seize the weapons and supplies that Americans had stored at Concord, Massachusetts. In the early morning hours of April 19, the British troops ran into about 70 American minutemen on Lexington Green. These men were led by Capt

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On this day in 1861, the first shot of the Civil War is fired. You may remember from yesterday’s story that Confederate and Union forces had been at a stalemate in South Carolina. The federal government needed to resupply Fort Sumter, but it could not do so without treading into Confederate territory. The Confederacy viewed such federal movements as a sign of aggression and as a challenge to its sovereignty. Matters came to a head when Lincoln decided to send an unarmed resupply convoy to the st

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On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress adopts our Declaration of Independence. It had already resolved on July 2 that “these United Colonies are, and, of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States . . . .” Now it formally adopted a written document, too. It took nearly a month to write the Declaration. You may know that Thomas Jefferson was the primary author, but he had help, too. What is the rest of the story? On June 11, Congress nominated a “Committee of Five” to draft a declarat

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