Nick Lee

A literacy test given to black voters in the 1960s

In the 1960s, many Southern states in the United States employed literacy tests as a means to disenfranchise black voters. These tests were designed to be intentionally difficult and subjective, with the goal of preventing African Americans from exercising their right to vote. The tests were often administered in a discriminatory manner, with white voters being given easier versions or being exempt altogether.

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“Knocker-Uppers” – People who had the job of waking up workers during the Industrial Revolution, often by shooting dry peas from a pea shooter at their windows.

The role of the knocker-upper, a vital figure in British industrial towns, highlights the pre-digital solutions to everyday challenges before the widespread adoption of alarm clocks. These individuals were tasked with ensuring workers woke up in time for their shifts, particularly in northern mill towns and areas like London’s docks, where irregular hours were the norm due to fluctuating tides. Using a variety of tools from long sticks to pea shooters, knocker-uppers would tap on windows, efficiently rousing only those who paid for their services without disturbing others.

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Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, 1945

Imagine, if you will, an eight-square-mile inferno, an island so fiercely contested that it seemed as though the very gates of hell had opened. Iwo Jima was not merely a battle; it was a grinding, relentless slog. The Marines knew the importance of this speck in the ocean—vital for airfields to support the bombing of Japan. But so did the Japanese, entrenched in a labyrinth of caves and tunnels, prepared to fight to the last man.

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Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir at Yosemite, 1903

In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt posed with John Muir for pictures on Overhanging Rock at the top of Glacier Point and camped in a hollow there to awake to five inches of snow, which delighted Roosevelt. Roosevelt had sent Muir a letter asking to meet him in Yosemite: “I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you.” At their meeting, Muir spoke of environmental degradation, like development, and asked for another layer of protection as a national park to improve management. Muir convinced both Roosevelt and California Governor George Pardee, on that excursion, to recede the state grant and make the Valley and the Mariposa Grove part of Yosemite National Park. This joining together of the 1864 state grant lands with the 1890 national park lands occurred during Roosevelt’s presidency in 1906.