On November 13, 1942, five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa – George, Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert – died when the light cruiser USS Juneau was torpedoed and sank off Guadalcanal during World War II.
It remains the greatest combat-related loss of life by a single family in American military history.
Editor's Note: Walter Stahr is a historian whose essay “The Struggles of Edwin Stanton” appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of American Heritage. His most recent book is the widely praised Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln’s Vital Rival, in which portions of this essay appeared.
Editor's Note: Catherine McNeur is an associate professor of history at Portland State University and is the author of Taming Manhattan and Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science, in which portions of the following essay appear.
Editor’s Note: One of the most respected historians of the Civil War and America’s westward expansion, Peter Cozzens has written 17 books and recently published the third volume of his trilogy about the Indian wars in the United States. This essay consists of vignettes adapted from A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South. The previous two books in the trilogy looked at the wars in the Old Northwest and the American West. The latter book, The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, won the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History.
The War of 1812 was going badly for the United States in the summer of 1813. British forces menaced the Eastern Seaboard and had repelled American attempts to seize Canada. There were rumors of planned Indian uprisings west of the Appalachians, perhaps abetted by the British.
Editor’s Note: Gregory J. Wallance is a New York-based lawyer and author of several books, including the recently published Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, from which he adapted this essay. His new book tells the dramatic story of George Kennan’s years of exploration in frozen Siberia, and his travels to investigate and expose the brutal tsarist prison system. Wallance witnessed Russian cruelty during the Cold War when he went to the Soviet Union to help Jews emigrate and met courageous dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Yelena G. Bonner, who sacrificed so much in the fight for freedom in their time.
On February 12, 1825, in the alcove of a second-floor room in a grand, white, Federal-style stagecoach inn and tavern, Chief William McIntosh, the half-Scottish, half-Creek leader of the Lower Creek Indians, along with five fellow Lower Creek chiefs and federal representatives, signed the Treaty of Indian Springs. This monumental accord declared that 4,700,000 acres of Muscogee land in Georgia would be sold to the United States. There, inside the inn and tavern that he built just two years earlier, McIntosh signed his death sentence.