Lieutenant Robert “Bob” Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th United States Army Air Force in the Pacific during World War II. Born on December 19, 1921 in New York City, Bob was a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Williams College in Massachusetts when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In a 2006 oral history, Bob recalled listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech. “I was a sophomore at Williams College studying in my room with the radio on (there was no TV in those days) and I heard President Roosevelt...

Lieutenant Bob Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th United States Army Air Force in the Pacific. This Spotlight is part of a series of documents detailing the experience of airmen in World War II. Click here for more information about Bob and to read more in this series.As part of the effort to secure land close enough to Japan to launch attacks against the mainland, the US Army and Navy began bombing the Bonin Islands of Iwo Jima, Hajajima, and Chichijima, in June 1944. Army and Navy bombers hit Iwo Jima for over eight months, culminating in...

Lieutenant Bob Stone served as a bombardier in the 431st Bomb Squadron (Heavy), 7th US Army Air Force in the Pacific. This Spotlight is part of a series of documents detailing the experience of airmen in World War II. Click here for more information about Bob and to read more in this series.After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, life changed dramatically for twenty-year-old Robert Stone and his family, as it did for all Americans. Bob finished his sophomore year at Williams College before enlisting in the USAAF Aviation Cadets in July 1942.Due to the number of men...

In September 1814, Francis Scott Key, an attorney and DC insider, watched the American flag rise over Baltimore, Maryland’s Fort McHenry from a British ship in the harbor. Key had been negotiating the release of an American captive during the War of 1812 when the British attacked the fort. After twenty-five hours of heavy bombardment, Key was sure that, come dawn, the British flag would be flying over Baltimore. Upon seeing the American flag still aloft, he wrote, on the back of a letter, the first verse of what would eventually become the national anthem of the United States....

On the morning of September 15, 1963, Denise McNair (age 11), Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Cynthia Wesley (age 14), and Carole Robertson (age 14) were killed when nineteen sticks of dynamite exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Fourteen others were injured in the bombing. Just five days after the bombing of the church, the Reverend C. Herbert Oliver wrote a “Report on Birmingham,” making an appeal on behalf of the Inter-Citizens Committee to prospective supporters and documenting the violence that was consuming the city. The Inter-Citizens...

On June 25, 1950, war broke out on the Korean peninsula when the Soviet-backed Communist forces in North Korea invaded the recently founded democratic republic of South Korea. Following a unanimous UN resolution condemning the invasion, President Harry S. Truman committed US troops to the conflict. The United States took the lead in fighting North Korea to combat the spread of Communism. The events in Korea contributed to the escalation of the Cold War, a decades-long rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Active combat ended in a cease-fire in 1953, but no peace...

In February 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt stunned the country by challenging President William Howard Taft for the Republican nomination. The move was not only a rejection of his friend Taft, it also violated an unwritten rule of American politics. Roosevelt had already had two terms in office, and no president had ever had a third. Roosevelt insisted that he was running out of duty, not personal ambition. As president, he had charted a politically progressive course, but under Taft, his chosen successor, the country had been becoming more conservative. In 1912...

In this letter written in July 1912, during his campaign for a thrid term as president, Theodore Roosevelt informs the state and county chairmen of the Progressive Party of his plan to support women’s suffrage. The document shows the many edits Roosevelt made as he refined his message. Roosevelt wrote this letter supporting women’s suffrage in 1912, but he had fought for equality for women much earlier in his life. As a senior at Harvard University in 1880, he had written about marriage equality and urged women not to change their last name upon marriage. As a New York State...

Between 1629 and 1640, 20,000 Puritans left England for America to escape religious persecution. They hoped to establish a church free from worldly corruption founded on voluntary agreement among congregants. This covenant theory governed Puritan social and theological life, including the annual elections in which all free men, or church members, could vote. As John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, explained in his letter written on May 22, 1634: “Our civil Government is mixt: the freemen choose the magistrates every year . . . and at 4: courts in the...

By October 1780, in the midst of the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton was discouraged by the apparent apathy of the American people and the ineffectuality of their elected representatives, as well as by the recent discovery of Benedict Arnold’s treachery. Hamilton, who was serving at the time as an aide-de-camp for General Washington, was an idealist, but he could also face reality, and much of it was dark. Working for the Commander in Chief plunged him into the country’s financial and constitutional problems. Congress, in its original form, lacked the power to tax;...