A Day in New York, 1790

You arrive on Friday, January 8, 1790. New York is the federal capital. Before noon, George Washington will deliver his first annual address to Congress inside Federal Hall...

Time Surfing Graphic History - read it here.

A Day of Discovery at Sutter’s Mill, 1848

On January 24, 1848, California was still Mexican territory in name, a remote frontier of pine-covered Sierra foothills, rushing rivers, and scattered ranchos. John Sutter’s mill at Coloma on the South Fork of the American River was a half-finished wooden sawmill, built by carpenter James Wilson Marshall and a crew of Mormon Battalion veterans plus Maidu Indian laborers. Marshall, a 37-year-old New Jersey native, had come west seeking land and work. That Monday morning he inspected the tailrace as usual. What he found in the gravel would remake the United States...

Read it here: Time Surfing: Graphic History.

A Day Escaping the World Trade Center, 2001

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial airliners in a coordinated terrorist attack on the United States. At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower between floors 77 and 85.

Stanley Praimnath, a 45-year-old loan officer for Fuji Bank, sat at his desk on the 81st floor of the South Tower—directly in the impact zone. What happened over the next thirty minutes became one of the most improbable survival stories in American history... read the rest here.

A Day Men Soared Above Paris, 1783

In 1783, France was ruled by Louis XVI, while the newly independent United States still had Benjamin Franklin serving as its representative in Paris. That summer, Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier proved that heated air could lift a fabric balloon. Animals flew at Versailles in September, and men made short tethered ascents in October.

On November 21, Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, Marquis d’Arlandes, attempted something new: a flight with every restraining rope released. Continued here.

A Day Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto, 1943 - Time Surfing

Time Surfing: Graphic History...

Read it here.

 

A Day the British Left New York City, 1783

For seven years and two months, New York City belonged to the British Army. Redcoats had taken it in September 1776, and a fire days later gutted a fifth of the town, leaving Trinity Church a burned shell and creating a slum of sailcloth-roofed ruins called Canvas Town. The city became the empire’s American headquarters and a magnet for Loyalist refugees — and for thousands of enslaved people who fled to British lines seeking the freedom promised by proclamation. Churches were turned into prisons, stables, and hospitals; American captives died by the thousands in the Sugar House jails and the prison hulks in Wallabout Bay...

From the Time Surfing Graphic History Series. Read it here. 

A Day at the Battle of Bunker Hill, 1775

Two months after Lexington and Concord, some 15,000 New England militiamen ringed Boston, penning up General Thomas Gage’s professional army inside the town. When word leaked that the British meant to seize the high ground around Boston, the colonial council of war ordered Colonel William Prescott to fortify the Charlestown peninsula. On the night of June 16, about 1,200 men marched out with picks and shovels and dug a dirt fort on Breed’s Hill — closer to Boston, and far more exposed, than the Bunker Hill they’d been sent to hold...

Read it here.

A Day Among the Enslaved: Fanny Kemble in Georgia, 1839

Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble was 29 years old, English, and famous. She came from Britain’s greatest theatrical family, packed houses in London and Philadelphia, and quit the stage in 1834 to marry Pierce Mease Butler, a charming Philadelphian she believed was simply rich. He was rich because his grandfather had built an empire in the Altamaha River delta: rice on Butler Island, Sea Island cotton at Hampton on St. Simons, corn and cattle at Woodville — and roughly 700 enslaved men, women, and children who made it all run...

Time Surfing: Graphic History - read it here.

A Day the Black Death Reached London, 1348

In the summer of 1348, ships from English-held Gascony carried a new sickness into the little Dorset port of modern Weymouth. It spread up the roads through Salisbury, Winchester, and Bristol, and by the feast of All Saints — 1 November 1348 — it had reached London, a walled city of 70,000 souls packed into a square mile of timber houses, open drains, fish markets, and dung heaps. Nobody called it the Black Death yet; they called it “the pestilence” or “the great mortality,” and they believed it came from corrupted air, bad planetary conjunctions, or the wrath of God...

Time Surfing: Graphic History - read it here.

A Day of Carnage at Shiloh, 1862

In early April 1862, a Union army under Ulysses S. Grant camped along the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing, waiting for reinforcements before pushing south into Mississippi. Their camps were spread loosely across farm fields and oak woods near a small log church called Shiloh Meeting House. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston marched 44,000 men up from Corinth to hit Grant first. At dawn on Sunday, April 6, they did...

Time Surfing Graphic History: read it here.

A Day Unearthing Treasure at Troy, 1873

In 1873, the low mound called Hisarlık, five kilometers inland from the Dardanelles in Ottoman Turkey, was being torn apart by a wealthy German merchant named Heinrich Schliemann. He had made a fortune in indigo, banking, and Crimean War contracts, then retired at 47 to prove that Homer’s Iliad described real places. Frank Calvert, an English-born consular agent who owned half the mound, had told him where to dig. Schliemann drove a giant trench straight down through nine buried cities, employing up to 150 Greek and Turkish villagers under an Ottoman permit that required him to split every find with the Imperial Museum in Constantinople...

Read it here.

A Day of the Duel That Changed America: Hamilton vs. Burr, 1804

By the summer of 1804, Alexander Hamilton was a man out of power. Born poor in the Caribbean, orphaned, he had clawed his way up to become George Washington’s aide, a Revolutionary War hero at Yorktown, the author of most of the Federalist Papers, and the first Secretary of the Treasury — the man who built America’s banking system, its credit, its Coast Guard, and its Mint. But his Federalist Party was collapsing. Thomas Jefferson had beaten John Adams in 1800, and Hamilton’s own pamphlet attacking Adams had helped wreck his party. Worse, Hamilton had spent fifteen years publicly and privately calling Vice President Aaron Burr a dangerous, unprincipled man — first by throwing his influence behind Jefferson to break the deadlocked 1800 election, then by helping sink Burr’s 1804 run for governor of New York...

A Day of the Duel That Changed America: Hamilton vs. Burr, 1804

Time Surfing: Graphic History.

A Day with Francis Scott Key at the Battle of Fort McHenry, 1814

In the summer of 1814, the War of 1812 came home to America. British troops burned Washington on August 24, then turned toward Baltimore, the third-largest city in the United States and a nest of privateers the Royal Navy called “a den of pirates.” Our subject is Francis Scott Key, a 35-year-old Georgetown lawyer, a devout Episcopalian, a slaveholder, and a man who had opposed the war from the start. When the British seized Dr. William Beanes, an elderly physician, Key agreed to help get him back...

Time Surfing Graphic Histories: A Day with Francis Scott Key at the Battle of Fort McHenry, 1814.

A Day Providence Saved George Washington's Life, 1755

In the summer of 1755, Britain and France were fighting an undeclared war over the forks of the Ohio River, where the French had built Fort Duquesne (today’s Pittsburgh). Major General Edward Braddock, a 60-year-old career officer, cut a twelve-foot road through 110 miles of mountain wilderness to take the fort with roughly 1,300 regulars, provincials, sailors, artillery, and a train of wagons and packhorses.

Riding with him as an unpaid volunteer aide-de-camp was 23-year-old George Washington of Virginia — six feet two, red-haired, ambitious, and desperate for a royal commission. Washington had spent the previous two weeks flat on his back in a wagon with bloody flux...

Time Surfing Graphic Histories: Read it here.

The Time Surfing Portal is here [Updated]

Update: the server issue some encountered is fixed.

"Time Surfing" is the term I use to describe the series of illustrated articles that put you into the life of a figure from history. You experience that day almost as if you're watching it happen. There are over 120 episodes with more to come, including video versions. You can pick almost any pivotal day in history and watch it unfold...

Check it out at timesurfing.org. And let us know what you think!

A Day Humanity Took Flight, 1903

For four seasons, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio — Wilbur and Orville Wright — had camped on a windswept sand spit between Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic, testing gliders and, in 1903, a 605-pound machine of spruce, ash, muslin, bicycle chain, and a home-built 12-horsepower gasoline engine. Their nearest neighbors were the men of Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station No. 10, part of the U.S. Life-Saving Service, the federal outfit that patrolled these beaches on foot day and night to pull sailors out of the surf...

Time Surfing: Graphic History Series.

A Day Lewis and Clark Confronted the Lakota Sioux, 1804

In the late summer of 1804, the Corps of Discovery — the Lewis and Clark expedition — pushed up the Missouri River carrying President Jefferson’s orders: find a route west, and tell every tribe they met that they now had a new “great father” in Washington. By late September the expedition reached the mouth of the Teton, or Bad, River — today’s Pierre, South Dakota — and ran straight into the Teton Sioux, the Lakota, who controlled river traffic and taxed every trader who came upstream...

Time Surfing: Graphic History.

A Day Escaping Libby Prison, 1864

By the winter of 1863–64, Libby Prison — a converted ship-chandler’s warehouse on Cary Street in Richmond, Virginia — held roughly 1,200 captured Union officers packed into eight bare rooms with no beds, no chairs, no heat, and rations that had shrunk to a fist of coarse cornbread and a swallow of water. Men died of dysentery, pneumonia, and starvation. Colonel Thomas E. Rose, a 34-year-old former Pennsylvania schoolteacher captured at Chickamauga in September 1863, arrived in October and began looking for a way out almost the moment he came through the door...

Time Surfing: read it here.

The Time Surfing Portal is Here!

For those who like the "Time Surfing Graphic History" series, there's a new portal that lets you navigate through some of the most pivotal days in history. 

Check it out at timesurfing.org and let us know what you think!

Update: please let me know if you can't get to the site in the comments or email.

A Day with Maggie Brown on the RMS Titanic, 1912

Margaret Tobin Brown was 44 years old in April 1912. Born in Hannibal, Missouri, to poor Irish immigrants, she went west to Leadville, Colorado, married mining man J.J. Brown, and became suddenly rich in 1893 when his Little Jonny Mine hit gold. She taught herself languages, worked for women’s suffrage, juvenile courts, and miners’ families, and was separated — but not divorced — from J.J. In April 1912 she was touring Egypt and Europe with John Jacob Astor IV and his young wife when a cable said her grandson was sick. She booked passage home on the new White Star liner Titanic, boarding at Cherbourg on April 10 with her friend Emma Bucknell...

Time Surfing Graphic Histories: read it here.