Grant Shot at Ford's Theater

[Sean McKnight]

On the evening of April 14th, 1865 President Lincoln and the First Lady attended the play Our American Cousin, just five days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Also in attendance was General Ulysses S. Grant, who went ahead with his plan to join the President despite a desire to visit his children in New Jersey.

At 10:14 pm, John Wilkes Booth entered the back of the Presidential box, and as he prepared to draw his gun Booth was spotted by Grant who tackles the assassin to the floor. In the struggle, Grant was shot in the chest while grappling for Booth's derringer. As Booth attempted to flee he was captured by Major Henry Rathbone. General Grant was then taken across the street to the Petersen House where doctor Charles Leale, Charles Sabin Taft, and Albert Freeman Africanus King, Lincoln pronounced Grant dead several hours later.

After being flogged by Union Army officers for several hours, Booth confessed to being a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle and revealed the identities of Lewis Powell (who was assigned to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward at his home), George Atzerodt (who was to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood Hotel), and David E. Herold as fellow conspirators.

The Assassination of General Grant, and the discovery of Booth's ties to the Confederacy shocked the nation, and forced Lincoln to reassess his plans for Reconstruction. Secretary of War Edward M. Stanton and Attorney General James Speed pushed Lincoln to broaden the scope of the trial of the conspirators. Lincoln ultimately decided to try Booth and his associates in a civilian court, but ordered Secretary of Stanton to proceed with rounding up Confederate leaders for arrest and trial for high treason. On September 30th, 1865 the Fort McNair Trials began, and over the course of 13 months the military tribunal found guilty and hanged most of the Confederate leadership, including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. While the trial was being carried out, a separate legal battle was brought before the courts by southern lawyers seeking to save their leaders from the gallows, hoping that by establishing the legality of secession, the Confederate leadership could then not be convicted. The court ultimately ruled that Secession was unconstitutional.

The execution of the Confederate leaders, and Lincoln's decision to uphold General Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15, gave rise to militant groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which attempted to raid patrols of occupying Union troops, capture arms, and ultimately restart the war. Lincoln leaned heavily on his Commanding General of the Army,
William Tecumseh Sherman to stamp out the "Lost Cause" movement, and those close to the President remark on the weariness at which he approached each day, and relied more and more on Sherman. Just three years after leaving office Abraham Lincoln died of a stroke at the age of 63.

Shortly after the Inauguration Day celebrations of 1869, a group of neo-confederate troops attempted to take control of a US Army armor in Texas shortly before its readmission to the Union. The failed attack on Tyler Arsenal ultimately spelled the end for the Neo-Confederate movement, as it prompted Congress to push through the Third Enforcement Act which empowered President Salmon P. Chase to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat Neo-Confederate and white supremacy organizations.

 

[Sean McKnight]

President Salmon P. Chase and the Republican Congress would spend much of the early 1870s pushing Industrial Reconstruction. The Chase administration incentivized Southerners by making low-rate government backed business loans available to states that had met their Reconstruction requirements. Once more, these loans were to be given out regardless of race, leading to many of the new black farmers being on equal footing with their white neighbors.

Chase's policies gave rise to a short economic boom, but after his death in 1873, the country would enter a constitutional crisis and the worst Depression yet seen. Vice President Schuyler Colfax declined to serve another term as Chase's Vice President, leading to Senator Henry Wilson receiving the Republican Party's nomination for Chase's Running mate. As Chase had died before being sworn in in 1873, it was unclear who would succeed the President, as Colfax was the sitting VP. Ultimately the Supreme Court held that Vice President Elect Henry Wilson would ascend to the Presidency, while the US Senate returned the Vice Presidency to Schuyler Colfax who agreed to serve for another two years. However, in 1875, President Henry Wilson died from a stroke, which elevated Colfax to the Presidency, and forced Congress to draft the 16th amendment, establishing the formal succession of the President and procedures for removing an incapacitated executive from office.

Schuyler Colfax entered office as the most unwilling President in US history, and under perhaps the worst circumstances of any President. Marred by a corruption scandal just a few months prior to taking office after the death of not one, but two of his predecessors, and entering office at the outbreak of the Long Depression, Colfax had to work constantly to rally his party to taking swift action to provide economic relief. Colfax relied heavily on Treasury Secretary John Sherman for policy advice, while leveraging his connections in Congress to pass legislation. Despite a rough start, Colfax would prove to be an able administrator, balancing the need for a strong national currency with the responsibilities of Reconstruction, despite calls from conservative Republicans to end the practice in the face of the depression.

In the South, the government backed loans went from being a minor incentive to one of the region's few sources of economic security, and states pushed to accelerate reconstruction to gain access to financial assistance. By the time Colfax had left office in 1881, the industrial revolution was in full swing in the South. The Colfax administration's success led to James G. Blaine winning one of the biggest landslides in electoral history, while the Democrats failed to regain ground in Congress.

 

[Sean McKnight]

By the end of the 1870s Midwestern farmers formed the Grange Movement to pressure state governments to establish fair railroad rates and warehouse charges. The government backed low rate loans and strong currency that defined the Colfax administration had inadvertently created the conditions for railroads to move in quickly and monopolize warehouse infrastructure in the South, which in turn led to southern farmers allying with their northern counterparts to form the Farmers' Alliance. The short term goal of which was to extend the scope of the Chase administration's loans to allow farmers to use grain stored in government warehouses as collateral to gain access to new loans, thereby allowing them to not be beholden to tycoons and banks who had benefited the most from the Chase loans.

By 1892 the Farmers' Alliance grew to form a new political party, as the Democrats had largely lost their political relevance outside of northeastern cities. The People's Party or Populists as they were often called, held their first convention in 1892 in Omaha and ran Congressman James B. Weaver as their candidate against John Sherman and the Republicans who by this point had enjoyed 32 years of control of the White House and Congress. Sherman did not take Weaver's campaign seriously, and did not really campaign, but Weaver managed to narrowly beat Sherman as the first Populist elected in the country's history. Weaver's victory all but killed the Democrats' chances of survival, and by 1900 the party had dissolved.

Despite Weaver's surprise victory his Presidency was not particularly successful, as the Populists could not control the House and Senate without a coalition with Democrats, who seldom backed the Populists' proposals, particularly Weaver's more progressive proposals such as government ownership of the railroads. Weaver's administration also didn't have much luck beyond offering temporary relief to the Panic of 1892 and would be faced with another recession in 1895 that ultimately doomed his Presidency. Despite these failures, Weaver did secure his place in history as the President who formally brought Reconstruction to an end in 1896 with the readmission of Texas to the Union, despite the Republicans retaking control of the House in the midterms of 1894. Weaver would be defeated by Ohio Governor William McKinley in the 1896 elections, but his party would endure, winning back control of the House in 1904 and the Presidency the same year with the election of Clarence Darrow.

 

[Sean McKnight]

Weaver's Presidency, for all its failings, is generally considered the beginning of the Progressive Era. During this period the country experienced a wave of social reform and social upheaval as a generation of activists pushed new policies to deal with the inequities that had emerged at the close of the industrial revolution. Both the Republicans and the Populists had progressive wings, and leadership over the movement seesawed between the two parties from election to the next.

In the South, progressive politics met resistance from a new generation of black business owners and leaders who had finally come to enjoy a degree of economic parity with their white neighbors. Southern progressives tended to gravitate more towards social reforms espoused more by the Republicans rather than the more radical economic reforms pushed by many Populist politicians. One of the harshest critics of the Populist party of this era was Tuskegee University Founder Booker T. Washington, who by his death in 1915 had seen his university flourish with the endowments from its first generation of graduates. Harvard professor W.E.B. Dubious had a more nuanced attitude to Populist party "Penny Progressives" as they were often known, arguing the merits of many of the Party's proposed economic reforms (particularly government ownership of railroads and public banking), but criticizing the party's often dismissal or even contempt for issues facing black voters.

Washington and Dubois concerns were only addressed by one Populist candidate in this period, then Illinois Senator Clarence Darrow. Darrow had been a longtime progressive activist, first as a lawyer and then after his entry into politics in the 1890s. His campaign in 1904 sought to bring in African American support through an aggressive campaign to include more African Americans in the People's Party, a tall order especially after the Republican controlled Senate voted to confirm Blanche Bruce as the country's first black Vice President in 1901. Darrow had the good fortune however, for more conservative Republicans staging a political coup at the convention in Chicago, and nominating Ohio Governor William Howard Taft, who was believed by many to be a closeted white supremacist. This rumor would haunt Taft as he worked to bridge the gap between his party's conservative and progressive wings. At one point Taft's overtures to the progressives led to House Majority Whip Joseph Gurney Cannon summoning the candidate to speak to a group of conservative members of the House to assure them of his support for them in his cabinet. At this meeting Taft was reported by a congressional page that Taft promised to not hire any black Republicans to fill federal vacancies. The meeting came to be known as the "Cannon Ball" and is widely attributed to Taft and Cannon's defeats in the 1904 elections.

Republicans would spend the next four years working to repair the damage done by the Taft campaign, with Indiana Senator Charles W. Fairbanks leading the charge to purge the party of some of its more bigoted members of the conservative faction. Meanwhile the Darrow administration worked to breakup the massive Trusts that had come to dominate the American economy. Darrow however, would meet the same fate as Weaver, and in early 1908 the country would enter another economic crisis that would cost him re-election. In his last days in office, Darrow worked tirelessly to save the economy from ruin and managed to just barely push through the National Rail Act that created the country's first National Railroad Company.

Darrow would be succeeded by the last, and possibly greatest President of the Progressive era: Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had come within a hair's breadth of the Presidency a decade before, just barely losing the Vice Presidency under McKinley to John D. Long. Having run on a campaign of New Nationalism, Roosevelt pushed through some of the most consequential reforms of the progressive era, establishing the 8-hour workday, national-minimum wage laws, the aiding the passage of the Universal Suffrage Amendment, and farm relief. These reforms are often historical footnotes for the Roosevelt administration as the First World War (1912-1915) came to dominate his administration's second term. As the war came to bookend the Progressive era, Roosevelt's final reforms would be the passage of the Income Tax amendment, and completing the desegregation of the US military via executive order.

 

[Sean McKnight]

 

[Sean McKnight]

United Electric Company (UE) is an American multinational conglomerate incorporated in New York City and headquartered in Boston. As of 2018, the company operates through the following segments: aviation, communications, electrical power, digital industry, additive manufacturing, venture capital and finance, wireless inrastructure and lighting.

In 2019, UE ranked by the New Orleans Stock Exchange as the 21st-largest firm in the United States by gross revenue. In 2011, UE was ranked by the Bureau of Corporate Statistics as the 14th-most profitable company but has since very severely underperformed the market (by about 75%) as its profitability collapsed. Two employees of UE—
Nikola Tesla (1932) and Lonnie Johnson (1981)—have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

History
Formation
In 1884 inventor and patent draftsman Lewis Latimer left exploitative employ of Thomas Edison to found Latimer Electric Light Company. The primary financing for the company came after Latimer sued Edison for patent theft for the lightbulb in 1887; Latimer had created the lightbulb while under the employ of Edison, but as there had been no written agreement between Edison and Latimer pertaining to the assignment of intellectual property, the Supreme Court ruled that Latimer was the rightful inventor of the lightbulb. Latimer v. Edison (1887) made Latimer a household name, and attracked many Edison employees to Latimer's company.

In 1892 Nikola Tesla, another former Edison employee, delivered Latimer Electric the first working example of a Radio. Latimer awarded Tesla an $80,000 bonus that year (about $2.2 Million in 2019), and founded Latimer-Tesla Radio Company, giving Tesla carte blanche to experiment. By the turn of the century Latimer and Tesla were owner or part owner of a half dozen subsidaries, backed primarily by C. J. Walker, and the Westinghouse family.

In 1889, Drexel, Walker & Co., a company founded by C. J. Walker and Anthony J. Drexel, financed Latimer and Tesla's research and helped merge their companies under one corporation to form Latimer-Tesla United Electric Company, which was incorporated in New York on April 24, 1901. The new company also acquired Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company in the same year. In 1913, the company would aquire Edison Electric from their former employer, and would once again reogranize to become the United Electric Company. Latimer-Tesla Radio in many ways survies to this day as the American Radio Corporation (ARC), a subsidicary created shortly after the aquisition of Edison Electric.

Public company
In 1896, the immediate predecessor of UE, Latimer-Tesla United Electric, was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average, where it, and later as UE, remained a part of the index for 122 years. In that time UE has absorbed into its business numerous other companies and would-be competitors, and would routinely come under scrutiny from the Department of Business and Industry for anti-trust violations.

Electrical Infrastructure
UE's early history was defined by a war of infrastructure known as the Current Wars, where Latimer Electric and Edison Electric campaigned and lobbied to make their in-house current standards the national standard in the US. Latimer aggressively pushed Tesla's Alternating Current (AC), while Edison clung to Direct Current (DC). Ultimately, UE won out, and for all practical purposes that victory was the death knell for Edison Electric. From that point on, UE was the principal supplier of electrial substations, outlets, and other basic infrastucture in the United States. During the 1910s, UE pursued its most ambitious infrastructure project, the World Wireless System, a concept put forth by Tesla to provide wireless power and radio communications to the entire planet. However by 1920, UE quietly ended funding for the project, as Tesla's research team were unable to achieve practical wireless power transfer beyond a few thousand feet, and Tesla would later be forced to take a sabatical as he grew ever more obsessive in the face of the project's failures. Despite this failure, the research at the Wardenclyffe site did yield useful technologies for long range radio transmission, many of which were used to aid the Entente during World War I.

 

[Sean McKnight]

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1872) was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th president of the United States (1861–1869). Lincoln led the nation through its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis in the American Civil War. He succeeded in preserving the Union, abolishing slavery, bolstering the federal government, and modernizing the U.S. economy.

Lincoln's election in 1860 on an anti-slavery (but not abolitionist) platform led to pro-slavery elements in the South successfully pushing all white governments of the Southern states to secede from the union. To secure its independence and preserve the institution of slavery, the new Confederate States fired on Fort Sumter, a U.S. fort in the South, and Lincoln called up forces to suppress the rebellion and restore the Union. Lincoln managed the array of factions in Congress and his own White House by exploiting their mutual enmity, distributing political patronage, and through his masterful use of oratory to rally the people to his cause. His Gettysburg Address became a historic clarion call for nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy. Lincoln scrutinized the strategy and tactics in the war effort, including the selection of generals and the naval blockade of the South's trade. He suspended habeas corpus, and he averted British intervention by defusing the Trent Affair. He engineered the end to slavery with his Emancipation Proclamation and his order that the Army protect escaped slaves. He also encouraged border states to outlaw slavery, and promoted the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery across the country.

Lincoln originally sought to reconcile the war-torn nation by exonerating the secessionists. However, after Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth's assassination attempt on his life led to the death of General Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln was forced to re-evaluate his plans for reconstruction. The death of Grant and the threat against his own life deeply affected Lincoln; he conceded to Radical Republicans demands for harsher punishments for Confederate leaders and organized the Fort McNair Trials which led to the execution of most high ranking Confederates. Following the execution of confederate leaders, and with minor uprisings in the South looking to restart the Civil War, Lincoln empowered Commanding General William Tecumseh Sherman to use any means necessary to keep the peace in the South. The early days of Reconstruction took a toll on Lincoln's health, and his second term saw greater delegation to the members of his cabinet and General Sherman. The one exception to this was Vice President Andrew Johnson, who increasingly was seen as a southern sympathizer.

When Lincoln left office in March 1869, his health had noticeably deteriorated, and he avoided public appearances. He died at home on April 15, 1872. Evaluations of his presidency among historians and the general public place Lincoln as one of the country's greatest Presidents, after George Washington and William L. Dawson, but has also been subject to substantial criticism.

 

[Sean McKnight]

The United States Gendarmerie is the domestic law enforcement branch of the United States military placed under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department. Its area of responsibility includes smaller towns, rural and suburban areas, while civilian law enforcement agencies are largely exclusive to cities. Because of its military status, the Gendarmerie also fulfills a range of military and defense missions. The Gendarmes have a cybercrime division. The force has a strength of more than 100,000 personnel, as of 2019. The Gendarmerie has come into confrontation with state and local governments over the years, as the agency is required to enforce Federal Laws and adhere to the Constitution above often unconstitutional state laws.

History
Early Years
The Gendarmerie is the direct descendant of the United States Marshals, an institution that lasted from the ratification of the constitution until Reconstruction, and to a lesser extent the short-lived Secret Service, which was created in 1865 to combat a wave of counterfeiting in the United States. During the 1870s the US Army's occupation of the former states of the Confederacy was forcing the War Department to take on civilian law enforcement responsibilities that the Army was never designed for, and as a result numerous neo-Confederate groups were able to continue operating despite various powers given to the military to contain them. In 1878 on the advice of former Minister to France Elihu B. Washburne, then Senator James G. Blaine introduced the Posse Comitatus Act to create a military branch purely for civilian law enforcement. Opposition to the act came largely from the remnant Democratic party and conservative anti-Reconstruction Republicans, but was ultimately passed and signed by President Schuyler Colfax, establishing the United States Gendarmerie under the Justice Department. The first Chief of Staff of the Gendarmerie was Allan Pinkerton.

The early days of the Gendarmerie saw the service routinely come into conflict with the US Army, despite General William T. Sherman's initial support for the agency. General Allan Pinkerton secured the reputation of the Gendarmerie through the creation of its investigating arm, the National Intelligence Service (NIS), which successfully identified neo-Confederate terrorist groups, most famously leading to the arrest of the membership of the White League. By 1881 the Gendarmerie had subsumed all responsibilities of Reconstruction previously given to the US Army. By the time Texas was readmitted to the Union in 1896, the Gendarms had largely shifted to a primarily civil law enforcement roll held by the US Marshals and to a lesser extent the Secret Service.

20th Century
The 20th Century saw the Gendarms engage in occasional clashes with local governments in the Interior with large populations of former southern rebels who had left during the Great Migration, peaking with the Valentine Rising of 1914 where over 50,000 Gendarms assisted by the US Army were deployed to put down a neo-Confederate uprising that began in Arizona.

After the First World War, the Gendarms played a major role in the Wilson-Bayou Affair, wherein a secret society of the Ku Klux Klan was uncovered in the city of New Orleans that had attempted to stage a terrorist attack against Republican presidential candidate Charles Curtis. The resultant discovery of membership records revealed former Washington University chancellor, and People's Party candidate Woodrow Wilson was a grand wizard of the KKK. Wilson's arrest shortly before he was expected to receive his party's nomination would be the most high profile political arrest of the 20th Century.

Contrary to popular perception, the Gendarms did not play a major roll in Patton's Rebellion (1940-1942). While initially the Gendarms were deployed to put down riots and civil unrest following the 1940 elections, they were relieved by National Guard units almost immediately after Brigadier General Patton launched his assault on Fort
Fort Leavenworth. It was only after the bulk of the rebels had been put down that the Gendarms were sent in to occupy the interior once again. However, many Gendarms did transfer to the Army and remained even through the end of the war where they played a critical roll in Denazification.

 

[Sean McKnight]

The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Western Migration or the Southron Migration, was the movement of 6 million White Southerners out of the rural Southern United States to the American Interior, Mexico, central America, and South America that occurred between 1865 and 1940. During Reconstruction former Confederates and later generations of Southron Americans fled to Mexico, Central and South America, and the American Interior. The reasons most frequently cited were fear of persecution by freed slaves and the Union Army, or outright disdain for the new social order imposed by Reconstruction.

In every U.S. Census prior to 1890, the American South was majority white, and only 1/3 of African Americans lived in urban areas. By 1900 a majority of those living in the former-Confederate States were of African descent and a majority lived in urban areas. By the end of the Great Migration, just over 50% of the White population of the South remained there, while a majority of those descended from White Southerners lived in the American Interior and West. By 1940 less than 1/5 of Southron Americans living in the Interior lived in cities, compared to a majority of those who still resided in the American South.

The Great Migration marked a cultural shift between the white residents of the South and the Southron Americans who left for the Interior. The 1940 Census indicated that only 30% of White Southerners self-identified as Southron Americans, compared to 50% of whites polled in Arizona, Colorado, and Dakota. Of those polled, only 10% of White residents of the South indicated they had a strong connection to the Confederacy, while in the Interior 39% answered in the affirmative. The 1940 census saw the peak of Southron identity in the US; with the death of the last Confederate veterans every successive census showed fewer and fewer Americans identified with Southrons. By the turn of the Millenium, less than 5% of all Americans identified as Southron-Americans, with the highest number being in Wyoming at 15%.

Confederados
Of the 6 million White Southerners who fled the South, the majority of the South's aristocrats who lost their land fled to Latin America, with Brazil being the largest single destination. Over 300,000 former Confederates settled in Brazil, the overwhelming majority in Sao Paulo, and established new slaveholding plantations and in many cases entire communities known to local Brazilians as Confederados. Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II actively encouraged former Confederate rebels to immigrate to Brazil, providing land and financial assistance in the hope that the Confederados would help grow the Brazilian economy. By the 1880s the then unrecognized "New Texas" colony was making a serious push for recognition, partly to oppose the growing push to abolish slavery outright. When Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil, promulgated the Lei Áurea ("Golden Act") in 1888, a group of Confederados led by the 88 year old former colonel of the Confederate Army, William Hutchinson Norris, declared the independence of New Texas and raised an army of 12,000 men with the intent of taking the city of Sao Paulo and securing the creation of a neo-Confederate slaveholding nation. The Army of New Texas lived only to fight a single battle at Campinas before being driven back by the Brazilian army who proceeded to burn their capital of Americana to the ground, killing around 70,000 people.

 

[Sean McKnight]

Field Marshal Benjamin Oliver Davis Sr. (May 1880 - November 26 1970) was a senior officer of the United States Army who commanded the U.S. Seventh Army in the Mediterranean theater of World War II, and later during the Allied invasion of Germany. After the war, Davis became the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and oversaw the U.S. military's policy making in the Korean War.

Born in Washington, D.C., Davis lied about his age and enlisted in the Cavalry at the start of the Spanish–American War, and came under the tutelage of Charles Young. During World War I, Davis was stationed at Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming. In 1914 he first saw action after being deployed with the 9th Cavalry Regiment to support the United States Gendarmerie in putting down the Arizona Rebellion, America's first military action using motor vehicles.

After the war, Davis became a central figure in the development of the Army's armored warfare doctrine, serving in numerous staff positions throughout the country. At the American entry into World War II, he commanded the 2nd Armored Division.

Davis led U.S. troops into the Mediterranean theater with an invasion of Casablanca during Operation Torch in 1943, and soon established himself as an effective commander by rapidly rehabilitating the demoralized U.S. II Corps. He commanded the U.S. Seventh Army during the Allied invasion of Italy and became the first allied commander to reach Rome. Davis would continue to lead the Seventh Army during the combined allied invasion of Metropolitan France. After the breakout from Savoy, Davis was appointed to the rank of Field Marshal and took command of the Twelfth United States Army Group, which ultimately comprised forty-three divisions and 1.3 million men, the largest body of American soldiers ever to serve under a single field commander. Davis conducted a highly successful rapid armored drive across France. Under his decisive leadership, the forces of the twelfth army group drove deep into Nazi Germany by the end of the war.

During the Allied occupation of Germany, Davis was named military governor of the Rhineland and took an aggressive stance on denazification. He was appointed as Chief of Staff of the United States Army in 1948 and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1949. He was the senior military commander at the start of the Manchu War, and supported President William L. Daweson's policy of containment. Davis left active duty in 1953 (though remaining on "active retirement" for the next 17 years). He continued to serve in public and business roles until his death in 1970.

 

[Sean McKnight]

Lev Davidovich Bronstein (7 November [O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky (/ˈtrɒtski/), was a Russian socialist revolutionary and political theorist who served as President of the Soviet Union from 1932 until his death in 1944. He was the country's first democratically elected head of state following the Russian Revolution of 1929. Ideologically a socialist, he served as the president of the Social Democratic Labour Party or Yedeviks from 1929 until 1941, resigning shortly after winning his fourth term. Trotsky directed the Soviet government during most of the Great Depression, implementing his Five Year Plan to modernize the Russian economy and provide immediate relief to the populace. His third and fourth terms were dominated by World War II, which ended shortly after he died in office.

The fifth child of a Ukrainian-Jewish family of wealthy farmers in Yanovka, Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879. After completing his education in 1895 Trotsky moved to the harbor town of Nikolayev (now Mykolaiv) on the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. There he became involved in socialist revolutionary politics, helping to organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev in early 1897. In January 1898, more than 200 members of the union, including Trotsky, were arrested. While awaiting trial in Moscow, he came into contact with other revolutionaries, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). In 1900, he was sentenced to four years in exile in Siberia, where he began advocating for the violent overthrow of the Tsar through foreign-based Russian language papers.
After escaping Siberia in 1902 Trotsky continued to grow as prominent revolutionary figure, and seeing his initial zenith in popularity during the First World War for his anti-war position. However, after Germany's defeat, Trotsky and other socialist revolutionaries lost a great deal of support from within Russia.

In 1919, after a failed sabotage campaign against the government, Trotsky and other revolutionaries were arrested. Trotsky was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the state, and would spend the next 10 years in prison. With the country facing economic ruin from the Great Depression, and famine sweeping the country, Tsar Nicholas II agreed to release Trotsky following the 1929 Revolution. Trotsky met with the country's socialist leaders and organized a united or Yedevik movement which drafted a new Constitution and held the country's first general election in which Trotsky became president in 1932. Leading a broad coalition which swiftly ratified the new constitution, Trotsky set to work combating the depression through the creation of a strict internal economy that ceased the export of Russian grain, while also instituting land reforms and modernize the country. Trotsky was seen internationally as a destabilizing figure, and the Russian Revolution was used by the Nazi Party to justify political repression against left-wing groups.

Trotsky hotly opposed the Munich Agreement of 1939 that ceded the Sudetenland to Germany, and worked to prepare the Soviet military and mobilize his country's economy for war. When Germany launched its invasion of Poland in 1940 Trotsky declared war and deployed the Soviet military, who suffered several grueling defeats mostly due to a failure of Soviet Intelligence to properly identify the size of Germany's forces at the time of invasion. With the US embroiled in another uprising in its interior, and the Western allies unable to mount an effective counterattack, Trotsky could do nothing to stop the German army from advancing into Russia. Trotsky commanded the people to resist at all costs, and ordered Russian factories in the country's west be dismantled or destroyed while new manufacturing was being stood up in the east. With the British and French knocked out of the war by 1942, Trotsky's health began to take a turn for the worse. He remained in Moscow for the duration of the German siege, and famously marched with Marshal Tukhachevsky when his forces finally came to the relief of Moscow in the spring of 1944. Trotsky would go on to win the a fourth term in the Soviet elections, but died in August 1944, less than five months into his fourth term. The war in Europe would continue for over another two years, during the presidency of his successor, Victor Chernov. Trotsky is held in deep respect within Russia, where he is often referred to as the "Father of the Nation". Internationally, Trotsky continued to be a well respected figure, even in the US during the early days of the Cold War with US President William L. Dawson speaking at the erection of a statue of Trotsky in Washington DC in 1952.

 

[Sean McKnight]

World War I (often abbreviated as WWI or WW1), also known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war that lasted from 28 July 1912 to 11 November 1915. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilization of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest and deadliest war up to that point in history with an estimated six million combatant deaths and nine million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war.

In 1904 the Britain and France entered into the Entente Cordiale, with the US joining later in the fall of 1909. The agreement was initially about formalizing colonial territory, however it provided the foundations for the Entente alliance. On 1 July 1912, the German gunboat SMS Panther arrived at the port of Agadir, the US sent the USS Macon to defend their leased port. The crisis, while initially prompted by French overzealousness in the Morroccan interior came to a head when Germany fired on the Entente Fleet after a perceived attack from the Macon. The following day the French declared war on Germany.

A network of interlocking alliances enlarged the crisis from a relatively minor naval skirmish to a war involving most of Europe. By August 1912, the great powers of Europe and their New World allies and dominions were divided into two coalitions: the Quadruple Entente, consisting of France, Russia, the United States, and Britain; and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The Triple Alliance was only defensive in nature, allowing Italy to stay out of the war until April 1913, when it joined the Allied Powers after its relations with Austria-Hungary deteriorated. Russia mobilized on the evening of 30 September; the following day, Austria-Hungary and Germany did the same, while Germany demanded Russia demobilise within twelve hours. When Russia failed to comply, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 October in support of Austria-Hungary, the latter following suit on 6 August. The US would take over a year to fully mobilize, and would be limited to maritime engagements during the opening days of the war.

Germany's strategy was to rapidly concentrate the bulk of its army in the West to defeat France before American and British Imperial reinforcements could send in reinforcements, then shift forces to the East before Russia could fully mobilise. After driving through Belgium German and French forces met along the banks of the Marne River and fought to a stalemate that began a prolonged phase of trench warfare that would last until 1914.


...TBC

 

[Sean McKnight]

World War II (WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1940 to 1946... It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Entente and the Axis.

TBC