History

Here we bring you the fascinating world of history: U.S. history; archeological, anthropological, natural, and evolutionary history; plus historical figures. To know where we are going we must first understand where we have been.

____________________________________________________________________________________

2.75-Million-Year-Old Tools Rewrite Human Technological History

By George Washington University – SciTechDaily

We may be witnessing the moment when our ancestors first defied a hostile world, using the same tools in the same place for nearly 300,000 years despite the chaos of shifting climates.

Picture early humans carefully shaping stone tools over a span of nearly 300,000 years, all while facing frequent wildfires, severe droughts, and major environmental changes. A new study published in Nature Communications reveals compelling evidence of a long-lasting technological tradition from Kenya’s Turkana Basin.

At the Namorotukunan Site, an international team of researchers discovered one of the most extensive and ancient records of early Oldowan stone tools ever found, dating between roughly 2.75 and 2.44 million years ago. These tools, essentially the earliest multi-purpose “Swiss Army knives” created by hominins, show that our ancestors were not merely enduring harsh conditions but flourishing amid one of the most unstable climates in Earth’s history. Read more here.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The ‘Edmund Fitzgerald’ Sank Half a Century Ago. We’re Still Fascinated

Ari Daniel – Host, “There’s More to That” / Smithsonian magazine

Half a century ago, on an unseasonably warm fall day, the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald set off from the western edge of Lake Superior with a cargo full of iron ore. Within hours, a ferocious storm gathered in strength, ultimately producing 60-foot waves and sinking the prized vessel. There were no survivors. The exact cause of its demise remains unknown.

Over the decades, many ships have faced a similar fate on the Great Lakes, a part of the world that some say is more dangerous than the open ocean. But the tragedy of the Edmund Fitzgerald looms the largest in our collective national memory—and it led to changes in the maritime industry that dramatically improved the safety of shipping.

In this episode, host Ari Daniel speaks with author John U. Bacon about what made the Edmund Fitzgerald famous even before it sank, what we know and don’t know about the crew’s final moments, and the ship’s lasting legacy. Read more and hear podcast here.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Bizarre Trial of James Garfield’s Assassin

Christopher Klein – history.com

The shocking assassination of President James Garfield began with one man’s delusion. On July 2, 1880, Charles Guiteau arrived at the YMCA in Poughkeepsie, New York, to deliver the address he was certain would make Garfield president. Nobody came to listen.

Failure had dogged Guiteau throughout his life. He flopped as a lawyer, evangelist, insurance salesman and even as a member of a free-love commune. But when he finally delivered his oration in New York later that summer, the Illinois-born drifter convinced himself it clinched the Republican presidential nominee’s eventual victory.

When Garfield spurned his request for a plum diplomatic post in Vienna or Paris as a reward for sealing the White House, Guiteau decided to seal the president’s fate. Exactly one year after traveling to Poughkeepsie to hail Garfield, Guiteau shot him twice at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C.

At first, Guiteau appeared to fail yet again: Garfield survived the shooting. But he couldn’t…Read more here.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

At Nuremberg, World War II’s Battle Turned to the Courtroom, and an Eloquent Lawyer Helped Lead the Allies to Victory

David Noonan / Smithsonian magazine

In the fall of 1945, a bit more than six years after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started the biggest and deadliest conflict in history, a largely self-taught lawyer from a tiny hamlet in the southwest corner of New York State set out to convict the surviving Nazi leadership of crimes “so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” In his roughly four-hour opening statement at the first Nuremberg trial, Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States, offered the first full public picture of how the Nazis had planned and carried out the many horrors that shock the world to this day, including the systematic murder of an estimated six million Jews. 

The war in Europe had ended just six months earlier. But, as Jackson made clear to the International Military Tribunal, assembled to decide the fate of these higher-level Nazis, the Allies’ great victory would be incomplete without a legal reckoning suited to the scale of the offenses. Read more here.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________