1770 - The Boston Massacre took place as British soldiers, taunted by a crowd of colonists, opened fire, killing five people.

1867 - An abortive Fenian uprising against English rule took place in Ireland.

1868 - The Senate was organized into a court of impeachment to decide charges against President Andrew Johnson.

1933 - The Nazi Party won 44 percent of the vote in German parliamentary elections, enabling it to join with the Nationalists to gain a slender majority in the Reichstag.

1946 - Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo.

1953 - Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died at age 73 after nearly three decades in power.

1963 - The Hula-Hoop was patented by Arthur K. Melin.

1970 - The nuclear non-proliferation treaty went into effect.

1982 - Comedian John Belushi was found dead of a drug overdose at age 33.

1997 - Representatives of North Korea and South Korea met for first time in 25 years for peace talks in New York.

For as much of my life that I actually have a memory of, I've loved history. History, I believe, is an incredibly valuable course of study that no curriculum at any academic level is complete without. Sadly though, along with other social sciences and arts, history is being cut from educational programs.

My whole life I've lived in Tennessee, which is a state ripe with history, specifically concerning the Civil War. Six of the most important battles of the entire conflict occurred here. One of these six was the Battle of Stones River/Murfreesboro. The site of this astonishingly violent battle is only about six miles from where I go to school at MTSU, and I have never been. So I thought to myself, "Kyle," (Kyle is what I call myself), "it's kind of dumb that you love history so much, specifically military history, and you haven't even been to a free park that is practically in your back yard to experience it." So today I went, and what I learned really was incredible.

After suffering defeat at Perryville, Kentucky, Gen. Braxton Bragg of the CSA withdrew his army of 38,000 veteran troops to the city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee in October of 1862. During this time Gen. William Rosecrans was named commander of the Union Army of the Cumberland in Nashville. Under heavy pressure to move aggressively against the Confederate forces and take control of E. Tennessee, Rosecrans moved a little over half his army towards Murfreesboro, 43,000 men.

Murfreesboro was important for a number of reasons, first, as a former capital it was the nexus of several roads that branched out into the whole state. Second, what is now Old Nashville Highway was a crucial supply road from Nashville's large and numerous warehouses. And third, Murfreesboro was a critical link in the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad.

Rosecrans reached his position three miles outside of Murfreesboro on December 29, 1862 and began setting up his lines on the 30th. Both armies were in parallel lines stretching four miles from South West to North East. Both commanders had also devised the same strategy: Attack the enemy's right to get to his rear and cut him off from his base, and supplies. Since both plans were nearly identical, victory would probably go to whomever attacked first. Rosecrans ordered his men to be ready to attack after typical morning routines, but Bragg ordered an attack at dawn.

At 6am 10,000 Confederate troops moved in one gigantic onslaught against the Union right, catching them in the middle of breakfast and completely off guard. Most troops had no choice but to turn and run, leaving all of their belongings behind. The Union attack on the Confederate right was called off and reinforcements and reserves were rushed the flank. By the end of the day, the Confederate army had turned the Union line almost completely around on itself, but at a heavy cost. The Confederates had lost 1,000's of men and had not captured Nashville Pike, the crucial Union supply line. Only the far left portion of the Union line did not move during the battle. Despite repeated attacks and charges by the Confederates, some reaching as close as 150 yards, the line held. The area in which wave after wave was repelled was named Hell's Half Acre by the Confederate troops.


Hell's Half Acre

After the first day of battle came to a close, both sides took a desperately needed respite. January 1 was used to gather dead and wounded and mourn lost friends. But by the second, fighting had resumed. Near the close of the day, the Confederates were routing the Union lines once again, this time on their left. The soldiers began to retreat across the Stones River at McFadden's Ford and the Confederates pursued them. As they crossed the river however, a battery of 58 Union cannons decimated their ranks. More than 1,800 Confederate soldiers were killed in less than one hour and Union soldiers pushed them back across the river. After the failure of this final assault, the Confederates withdrew and the Union Army of the Cumberland occupied Murfreesboro.

Neither side ever distinguished who actually won or lost the battle because the casualties on both sides were so staggering. The Confederate army lost over 10,000 men and the Union, 13,000. The Battle of Stones River was the 7th most violent battle of the entire war.


December 31, 1862, or January 1-2, 1863:


Today:

The two pictures above are of an area of the battlefield named the Slaughter Pen. This patch of land was home to one of the most violent engagements of the battle. It was here that the "unstoppable" Confederate advance was held for two hours by Union cavalry and a light artillery battery of six cannons. At the end of the skirmish, bodies had to be stacked head height to make room to walk and rivers of blood (several inches deep in some places), bits of flesh, and body parts covered the exposed limestone rock.



This jacket belonged to a 19 year old boy who, during the last push, on the last day of the battle was hit with a 12 pound, solid shot, cannon ball. Both of his legs were torn off of his body at the waist and he died immediately. Accompanying his jacket is a letter written to his mother by a friend of his in the regiment, telling her about his death.

I know this is something of an atypical post for me, but there's just something about going to a place like this that really makes history real. I've written a thousand times in a thousand papers that history isn't just a collection of distant stories about various nobodies. It is a collection of real accounts with tangible artifacts that tell the stories about the lives of people here before us. But before today, they were just words. I realize that posting this up for you to read is kind of defeating my purpose but, all the same, I really want to encourage anyone who actually reads this to go out and experience history. Looking at artifacts found on the battle field, reading pages out of some of the soldiers' personal journals recording their most intimate thoughts and feelings, and then learning about how that person was violently killed 15 feet from where you're standing can evoke a genuine emotional response that just reading about it in a stale, cinder block classroom from a text book just cannot, and never will. History is an integral part of every person's life, whether you live here in Tennessee, or Calcutta, India. The reason I live where I do, eat what I eat, wear what I wear, and am who I am is because of history. Any time someone asks, "Why?", the answer, often times, is in history! If we take no steps to learn our history, or preserve our heritage, we loose a piece of who we are, and why we are. And if we loose portions of our history there will be no way to learn from it, and when you fail to learn from your experiences, particularly the bad ones, you tend to repeat them.

It's stories like this that make me feel like a failure...

1642: Astronomer, Galileo Galilei died in Arcetri, Italy.

1790: George Washing delivered the very first State of the Union Address in New York.

1877: Six months after defeating Lieutenant Colonel George Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn, Chief Crazy Horse and his warriors, outnumbered and outgunned, fought their final losing battle against the US cavalry in Montana. Four months later Crazy Horse and approximately 1,100 of his men officially surrendered near Fort Robinson in Nebraska.

1815: U.S. forces led by Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans, the closing engagement of the War of 1812.

1959: Fidel Castro arrived in Havana, completing the Cuban Revolution
-Also in 1959, Charles De Gaulle was inaugurated as president of France's Fifth Republic.

1973: Seven men went on trial for illegally entering the Democratic Party's head quarters at Washington DC's Watergate Hotel. The resulting scandal eventually lead to president Richard Nixon's resignation.

1982: AT&T settled the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against it by agreeing to divest itself of the 22 Bell System companies.

1987: The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 2,000 for the first time, ending the day at 2,002.25.