On This Day, October 17, 1777, one of the most extraordinary moments of the American Revolutionary War unfolded in Saratoga, New York. A British army laid down its weapons in one of the most important turning points of the American Revolution.

After months of fighting, British General John Burgoyne and his exhausted army faced a desperate situation.

Their mission had been ambitious: advance south from Canada, capture key positions along the Hudson River, and divide the rebellious American colonies from one another.

If successful, the plan could have dealt a devastating blow to the American struggle for independence.

But things did not go as planned.

American forces resisted the British advance in two major battles near Saratoga. The first took place on September 19, 1777, and the second on October 7.

Burgoyne's army suffered heavy losses, its advance stalled, and its hopes of receiving the support it needed began to fade.

Surrounded and with no reliable escape route, the British commander found himself running out of options.

Negotiations began.

Then, on October 17, Burgoyne's army marched out and surrendered its weapons to the American forces commanded by General Horatio Gates.

Nearly 6,000 British and German troops laid down their arms in a stunning defeat for the British war effort.

For the American revolutionaries, this was far more than a battlefield victory.

It proved that their army could defeat a major British force—and gave fresh hope to a revolution that was far from guaranteed to succeed.

But the consequences reached far beyond the battlefield.

Across the Atlantic, France saw an opportunity.

The American victory helped convince the French government that the revolutionaries had a genuine chance of defeating Britain. In February 1778, France formally allied itself with the United States, providing crucial military and financial support.

The war was no longer simply a struggle between Britain and its rebellious colonies. It had become a much wider international conflict.

That support would help pave the way toward the eventual American victory at Yorktown in 1781.

In 1783, Britain formally recognized American independence.

The surrender at Saratoga did not win the revolution by itself.

But it changed the course of the war and helped transform the American fight for independence into a cause backed by a powerful international ally.

One surrender. One turning point. A different future for a nation.

In February 1862 Capt. Quincy Gillmore was sent to Tybee Island to do what the experts said couldn't be done. Fort Pulaski's brick walls sat 1 to 2.5 miles away, and the thinking was that guns had no chance against heavy masonry beyond 1,000 yards. The Army's chief engineer, Joseph Totten, compared the fort to the Rocky Mountains. Robert E. Lee told the fort's commander, Col. Charles Olmstead, the Tybee guns couldn't open the walls at that distance.

Gillmore's men built 11 batteries at night, whispering and taking signals by whistle, and camouflaged the work before dawn. He had 10 experimental rifled cannon, and three key rifles fired from 1,640 yards. They opened on 10 April, and by 2:30 the next afternoon Olmstead gave up the fort. Gillmore was breveted brigadier general for it.

The lidar shows the five-sided fort right of centre, a triangular earthwork on its west side and the flat band of the moat around both.

1. Recent air photo of the same area, 2024
2. Fort Pulaski and its moat on Cockspur Island

Numbered pins on picture 2:
Pin 1: Inside the five-sided fort
Pin 2: The triangular earthwork west of fort
Pin 3: The flat moat band

Imagery: Coastal Regional Commission of Georgia (CRC), 2024.
Lidar: USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), public domain.

Hey guys! Here are my notes from U.S. History uploaded onto a website. There are over 200 events on here. Feel free to check it out!

AP U.S. History Timeline, 1491-Present

Hello, since this war has a strong connection to the American Civil War, I would like to clarify how you would characterize the actions of the Americans and Mexicans towards each other, who you would praise on each side, and why.

On This Day, October 16, 1846, a landmark medical demonstration took place at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA, helping launch the modern era of surgical anesthesia.

Before reliable anesthesia became available, major operations were often terrifying ordeals. Patients could experience excruciating pain while surgeons worked under immense pressure to finish as quickly as possible.

Then came a dentist named William Thomas Green Morton.

Morton had been experimenting with ether, a chemical whose vapor could render patients unconscious or insensitive to pain. He believed it could transform surgery.

On that historic day, Morton administered ether to Edward Gilbert Abbott, a 20-year-old printer who had a vascular growth beneath his jaw.

The operation was performed by renowned surgeon Dr. John Collins Warren before an audience of medical professionals.

As Warren operated, Abbott showed no obvious signs of experiencing the severe pain normally associated with such a procedure.

When the operation was over, Abbott reported that he had felt no pain during the surgery.

Warren reportedly turned to the watching doctors and declared,

“Gentlemen, this is no humbug.”

Those words became forever associated with the demonstration.

News of the procedure spread rapidly, encouraging doctors around the world to investigate the use of anesthesia in surgery.

The breakthrough did not happen in isolation. Other physicians had experimented with pain relief before Morton’s demonstration, including American surgeon Crawford Long, who had used ether during operations in 1842.

Nevertheless, the public demonstration in Boston became a crucial turning point in the acceptance and development of surgical anesthesia.

Over time, anesthesia helped make longer, more complex operations possible and transformed the experience of surgery for countless patients.

Today, October 16, is commemorated as World Anaesthesia Day, honoring the medical milestone that helped change surgery forever.

On October 13, 1776, Benedict Arnold ran his remaining ships aground on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, set them on fire, and led his surviving men into the woods. By any conventional measure it was a defeat. He had lost most of his fleet over two days of fighting against a British force that outgunned him completely. What he had actually accomplished was something the history books take a while to explain properly.

The British had spent most of that summer building a fleet powerful enough to control Lake Champlain and advance south toward Fort Ticonderoga. Arnold understood that he couldn’t beat them in a straight fight, so he didn’t try to. He positioned his ships behind Valcour Island to force the British into restricted waters where their superior firepower mattered less, fought them hard enough to damage both sides, then slipped most of his fleet past them in the dark and made them chase him south for two more days before the end came. By the time it was over, the campaigning season was effectively finished. The British commander Guy Carleton looked at his situation, looked at the calendar, and decided not to advance against Ticonderoga before winter.

That decision gave the Americans a year.

In 1777, when the British tried again under Burgoyne, they ran into an American army that had spent the winter recovering and reorganizing. Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in October. France, which had been secretly supplying the Americans for months while waiting to see whether the rebellion could actually survive, signed a formal military alliance in February 1778. That alliance brought the naval power that would eventually make British defeat possible.

The chain runs directly back to Arnold running his ships aground in a bay that would eventually carry his name. He didn’t win at Valcour Island. He bought time. And the time turned out to be worth everything.

Then at Saratoga itself, he was there again.

By that point Arnold and his commanding general Horatio Gates genuinely hated each other. Arnold believed his leadership at the first battle of Saratoga on September 19 had been decisive and that Gates had deliberately left his name out of the official report. He wasn’t entirely wrong about either thing. Gates relieved him of command. Arnold stayed in camp without a formal role while the campaign continued around him.

On October 7, during the second battle, Arnold rode onto the field anyway. Nobody had authorized it. He didn’t have a command. He just showed up and started directing troops, helping overwhelm critical British positions before taking a musket ball in the same left leg that had been wounded at Quebec two years earlier. He spent the rest of the battle lying in the dirt while the fighting finished around him.

Ten days later Burgoyne surrendered.

There is a monument at Saratoga National Historical Park that commemorates the leg of an American general wounded during the battle. It doesn’t say his name.

To understand how Arnold got from October 1776 to September 1780, when he agreed to hand West Point to the British, you have to take the grievances seriously without excusing what he did with them.

He was passed over for promotion to major general in February 1777 while five officers with less distinguished records were elevated above him. For an eighteenth century officer this wasn’t a bureaucratic irritation. Rank was how the world measured your worth and your honour, and Arnold took the slight as a personal declaration that Congress didn’t respect what he had done. Washington eventually got him the rank, but the damage to how Arnold understood his relationship with the cause he was fighting for had already been done.

After Saratoga he was given command of Philadelphia, which was a political minefield. The city was full of Loyalists, returning Patriots, commercial disputes, and accusations flying in every direction. Arnold lived expensively, got involved in some commercial activities that attracted serious scrutiny, and accumulated enemies faster than he accumulated money. Some of the accusations against him were politically motivated. Some weren’t. A court-martial in 1779 found him guilty on two relatively minor charges and Washington issued a formal reprimand, carefully worded to acknowledge his earlier service while making clear the conduct had been unacceptable.

For Arnold it was one more entry in a growing ledger of humiliations. He had nearly died twice for the Revolution. He had helped save it at moments when it genuinely needed saving. And the country he had bled for was nickel-and-diming him in front of a court-martial while men who had done far less collected their promotions and their reputations.

He had also by this point married Peggy Shippen, whose family had Loyalist connections and whose social circle included Major John André, the British officer who would become Arnold’s contact in the conspiracy.

By May 1779 Arnold was already secretly communicating with the British. The treason wasn’t a sudden decision made in anger after the court-martial. It developed over more than a year while he was still serving as an American commander, still accepting Washington’s trust, still being given more responsibility. In 1780, Washington gave him command of West Point.

Arnold had already agreed to hand it over.

The plot unraveled on September 23 when André was captured returning to British lines with documents hidden in his boot. When Arnold learned the conspiracy had been discovered two days later, he fled to the British warship sitting in the Hudson and left his wife and infant son behind. He wrote to Washington asking him to take care of Peggy. Washington did.

André was hanged as a spy. Arnold was commissioned as a British general and spent the rest of the war leading raids against Americans, including a campaign through Connecticut that burned his own hometown of New London.

The question his story keeps forcing is what to do with the first part when you know how it ends. The boot monument at Saratoga is one answer: honor the leg without naming the man. It’s awkward and a little strange and also probably the most honest the historical record can get about someone whose best moments and worst moments are equally real and equally consequential.

Arnold didn’t betray the Revolution because he was secretly a coward or always a villain. He betrayed it because he was a man with extraordinary pride who became convinced that the cause he had nearly died for multiple times had decided he didn’t matter. Whether that’s true in any meaningful sense, whether Congress and Gates and the court-martial actually wronged him badly enough to justify what he did, is a question the evidence doesn’t answer cleanly.

What the evidence does answer is that without him, the Revolution’s most important year looks very different. The delay at Valcour Island, the relief of Fort Stanwix, the fighting at Freeman’s Farm, the assault on the Breymann Redoubt. Remove Arnold from 1776 and 1777 and Saratoga becomes less certain. Make Saratoga less certain and the French alliance becomes less certain. Make the French alliance less certain and you’re in genuinely different territory about how this ends.

America’s most notorious traitor was also one of the people most responsible for the fact that there was an America to betray.

You can talk directly to Benedict Arnold on Virtual Wayback and hear how he understood his own choices, both the ones that helped save the Revolution and the one that didn’t. https://virtualwayback.com/blog/benedict-arnold-and-his-impact

The cups had 'AuH2O' on them.

The ad was paid for by Johnson's Mississippi campaign chairman Doug Wynn, (A personal friend of Johnson's wife) who also blocked the Mississippi freedom Dems from the National Dem convention that year.

In 1885 Harvard archaeologist Frederic Ward Putnam visited the Midwest and found plowing and development destroying many of its ancient mounds.

So in 1886 he raised the money with wealthy Boston women led by Alice Fletcher and bought 60 acres at Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio. It also took in three conical mounds and a village site. It became the first privately funded archaeological preserve in the US, and Harvard handed it to Ohio's historical society in 1900.

The serpent is a 1,348 ft earthen snake on a bluff above Ohio Brush Creek. Radiocarbon dates tie it either to the Adena around 300 BC or to the Fort Ancient around AD 1070, and archaeologists have argued over which.

In the lidar the winding ridge is the serpent, with the oval head at its upper left end and the coiled tail at the bottom.

1. Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio, in lidar with the trees removed
2. Same lidar view, shaded with elevation colors
3. Recent air photo of the same area

Numbered pins on picture 1:
Pin 1: A bend in the serpent's body
Pin 2: The oval at the head end
Pin 3: The coiled tail

Lidar: USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), public domain.
Imagery: Ohio DAS / OGRIP - Ohio Statewide Imagery Program (OSIP III/IV), 2017-2026, Public (state program; no restriction statement found).

We all know Andrew Johnson was disastrous for Reconstruction.

But here's something I suspect many people on this subreddit don't realize.

In 1876, EIGHT of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Lincoln or Grant.

And look at what that Court did:

• Slaughter-House Cases (1873): Narrowed the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause almost immediately after its ratification.
• United States v. Cruikshank (1876): Overturned federal convictions arising from the Colfax Massacre, where white supremacists murdered scores of Black citizens.
• United States v. Reese (1876): Invalidated important provisions of federal voting-rights enforcement legislation.
• Civil Rights Cases (1883): Struck down the public-accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

And guess who wrote the 1883 majority opinion?

Joseph P. Bradley.

APPOINTED BY ULYSSES S. GRANT.

The only dissenter was John Marshall Harlan, appointed by Rutherford B. Hayes.

Yes, that's right. Federal courts helped narrow its constitutional foundations.

The Union won the Civil War. Republicans in Congress enacted three constitutional amendments. Lincoln and Grant filled nearly the entire Supreme Court.

And yet here we are.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughter-House_Cases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Cruikshank

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reese

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Cases