FAMILY HISTORY: Anniversary- One hundred years in America.



Copy of the original ship's manifest.  Our family is listed at lines ten through fourteen.  From Ancestry.com.

I can't let this September go without marking an anniversary for my own family.  It was exactly one hundred years ago this month that my father, Bill Ackerman, landed in America.  My mother would come a few years later, in 1926, and they would meet on the lower East Side of NYC.  The rest, as they say, is history.

GUEST BLOG: Civil War- Antietam 1862 and its terrible general, George B. McClellan

Oil painting of General George Brinton McClellan, from a photograph by Matthew Brady.

  

With all attention these days on the national political campaign, let's not forget another big item this month, the 150th anniversary of Antietam, the bloodiest single-day battle in American history.  With 23,000 casualties, Antietam marked a turning point in the Civil War, prompting President Abraham Lincoln to move ahead with his Emancipation Proclamation while also ending the military career of the Union's controversial general, George Brinton McClellan.  McClellan's refusal to chase the enemy, either before or after the battle, finally would led Lincoln to take away his command.

Guest Photo: Roger Staubach and J. Edgar Hoover

To celebrate the return of NFL football this week, our friend Sally Mott Freeman has given us this gem of a photo showing none less that Roger Staubach, star quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys during the 1970s, standing with J. Edgar Hoover, Director-for-Life of the FBI.  The man wearing glasses on the left is Sally's Dad,  then-retired Navy Rear Admiral William C. Mott, who happened to be the one who brought them together.

POLITICS: The five longest Democratic Conventions.

Delegates gather in Baltimore for the 1912 Democratic Convention.  They would nominate Woodrow Wilson for President on the 46th ballot.

In case you forgot, the five longest National Political Conventions in American history all were on the Democratic side.  Democrats used to requires a two-thirds majority to pick a presidential nominee, a device designed in pre-Civil War days to assure slave-holding southern states a veto.  Scrapped in 1936, this two-thirds rule actually changed the outcome in 1860 and 1912, and made the others way longer than needed.