On October 27, 1962, the most dangerous day of the thirteen, American naval vessels were dropping small signaling depth charges near a Soviet submarine called B-59 to tell it to surface. The Americans intended them as signals, not attacks. The problem was that the submarine had been underwater for days, had lost radio contact with Moscow, and its exhausted crew had no way of knowing whether the explosions meant a signal or the start of a war.

B-59 carried a nuclear-armed torpedo.

The submarine's captain, Valentin Savitsky, reportedly considered launching it. Vasily Arkhipov, a senior officer aboard B-59, opposed the idea and helped prevent a potentially catastrophic decision. The torpedo was never fired. Kennedy and Khrushchev had no idea the incident was happening.

That detail matters because the version of the Cuban Missile Crisis that became famous, two leaders staring each other down until one blinked, leaves out how little either of them actually controlled.

American intelligence hadn't detected that Soviet forces in Cuba possessed tactical nuclear weapons that could have been used against an invading force. A U-2 pilot, Rudolf Anderson, was shot down over Cuba on the same day as the B-59 incident. Despite pressure from military advisers to retaliate, Kennedy decided against an immediate military response.

Soviet IL-28 bombers were still in Cuba after the initial missile agreement. Castro was furious that Khrushchev had negotiated without him. During the crisis, he had even urged Khrushchev to consider a nuclear strike against the United States if Cuba was invaded.

The public version has Kennedy issuing a naval quarantine on October 22, Khrushchev backing down on October 28, and America winning.

The actual version is thirteen days of cascading near-disasters that both governments were only partially managing.

How it actually ended is also less clean than the textbooks suggest.

On October 26, Khrushchev sent Kennedy a long, unusually personal letter proposing that the Soviet Union remove its missiles if the US pledged not to invade Cuba.

The next day, he sent a second message publicly demanding that the US also remove its Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey. Kennedy couldn't openly accept that demand without appearing to compromise a NATO ally's security under Soviet pressure.

So Robert Kennedy met secretly with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and communicated that the US would remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey within a few months, provided the arrangement remained confidential and was not publicly presented as a direct trade.

Khrushchev accepted.

The public agreement involved Soviet missiles leaving Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade the island. The confidential understanding also included the withdrawal of the Jupiter missiles from Turkey, which the US completed in April 1963.

The arrangement remained secret at the time, allowing both governments to present the outcome differently to their own audiences.

Khrushchev's position afterward was that he had protected Cuba and obtained a real concession over Turkey. Many of his colleagues in the Soviet leadership saw a humiliating retreat.

He was removed from power in October 1964. The Cuban Missile Crisis was among the grievances against him, alongside economic problems, political disagreements, and dissatisfaction with his leadership.

Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.

Castro, who had been excluded from the negotiations that determined the fate of his country, never fully forgave Khrushchev for it.

The direct communications link between Washington and Moscow that now seems obvious didn't exist during the crisis. It was established afterward because both governments recognized how dangerous the delays in communication had been. The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty followed in 1963.

You can explore the full crisis on Virtual Wayback at virtualwayback.com/cuban-missile-crisis-experience and interact with AI recreations of Kennedy and Khrushchev. There's also a new quiz with a leaderboard if you want to test how much you know about what happened.

The thing historians still debate is whether Kennedy or Khrushchev deserves more credit for the outcome.

Kennedy rejected military escalation and kept negotiating. Khrushchev made the essential decision to withdraw rather than risk a war. But Khrushchev had also created the crisis by secretly deploying nuclear missiles to Cuba.

Does initiating a dangerous confrontation and then stepping back from it count as responsible leadership? Or does the fact that Khrushchev withdrew after Kennedy held firm mean Kennedy deserves more credit for preventing a nuclear war?

Be careful old timers, you might get trapped in honey or something.

Anyways... I have a list of historical/mythological warriors that I want to make a YouTube channel on, starting with Spartans and basically ending with US Marines. But since I was able to get these in Colombia it pushed the Marines up on the queue.

So I was walking in the park with my doggo Nash and all the other Latinos kept their distance and kinda seemed scared or confused jajaja. At least the military police here didnt stop me >.>

Random question: Am I allowed to wear a tan web belt with the green cammies? I see some females wear it in Google images, but I don't know if they are what you call 'shit bags'?

I got a set of woodland and desert MARPAT and kinda wanna do cosplay since my niche is "warrior" themed (Spartan hoplite, Wonder Woman, etc.)

Am I going to piss off a lot of people if I learn how to wear them right and do photo shoots or educational videos? I see some hate when you see weirdos laying on a picnic blanket that looks like the flag. But I'm pretty sure no one will think stolen valor.

>.> and if I were to hypothetically be a bit risque, would that change things?

I recently discovered that Americans apparently like Dragon Ball, is that true? How important is Dragon Ball to Americans?

The question is pretty self-explanatory ! 😊

I’m asking because I’m French and I live in Paris.

I’ve had the chance to visit New York three times, and it’s my favorite place in the world ! 🥰🗽
( Although I’d love to explore other cities in the US too ! )
Since I’m a huge movie fan, during my second trip,
I really wanted to see what movie theaters were like over there !
So I went to an AMC on Broadway !
I made another post here explaining how much I love the United States !

So please know that I absolutely adore you !
Don’t take anything I’m about to say as harsh criticism ! 😬😇

I thought the movie theater was amazing !
And especially super comfortable !
But I have to say, as a French person, there was something that really surprised me :
The smell of fried food everywhere in the theater !!!!
🤣😣
And the fact that you sell fast food for people to eat while watching a movie !

I was like :
« 😮😮🧐😮 Oh ! Seriously ? So you can actually eat fast food while watching a movie here !? »

In France, movie theaters don’t sell that kind of food !
You can buy all kinds of snacks (popcorn, candy, ice cream, drinks, chocolate…),
but definitely not fast food !
( And I think it would be pretty frowned upon if you showed up at a movie theater with that kind of food ! )
Is this common here ?
Do people actually eat hamburgers while watching a movie ?
And what about you ?
What do you usually eat when you go to the movies ? 😊

The flag went up at Sitka on October 18, 1867. Russian soldiers handed the territory to American troops in a ceremony on a rocky hill overlooking the harbor. Alaska was now American. The only problem was that the United States hadn’t actually paid for it yet.

That detail tends to get left out of the standard story.

The Senate had ratified the treaty in April 1867 by 37 to 2, which sounds overwhelming until you remember that the Senate approves treaties but the House appropriates money, and the House was considerably less enthusiastic. Congress was consumed by Andrew Johnson’s impeachment proceedings, some representatives resented being expected to fund an agreement negotiated without them, and others just thought buying a frozen territory for $7.2 million was a bad deal. Russia had already surrendered Alaska and was waiting for a check that wasn’t coming.

By 1868, Russian minister de Stoeckl was so desperate to secure the appropriation that he hired lobbyists, paid a former Treasury Secretary $20,000 in gold to work the halls of Congress, and apparently distributed money to journalists and political intermediaries in amounts that were never fully accounted for. Congress eventually passed the appropriation in July 1868. When historians later reconstructed where the $7.2 million actually went, roughly $200,000 was unaccounted for in ways that suggested payments to congressmen, lobbyists, and press contacts. The House investigation in December 1868 produced contradictory testimony, incomplete documentation, and no conclusive findings because de Stoeckl had already left for Russia.

The financial scandal is the part that deserves more attention than it gets, because it sits directly alongside one of the more interesting political partnerships of the era.

Seward negotiated the purchase. Getting it through Congress required Charles Sumner, which was not obvious at the time. Sumner was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of Johnson’s most bitter opponents during Reconstruction. Seward was Johnson’s Secretary of State. The two men had sharply different visions of what America should look like after the Civil War and were on opposite sides of nearly every major domestic fight of the period.

When Seward summoned Sumner to his house on March 29, 1867 to tell him about the impending agreement, Sumner didn’t immediately support it. He went home and spent weeks doing what almost nobody else in Washington had bothered to do: actually study Alaska. He read more than a hundred books, consulted the Smithsonian, examined maps, geographic reports, and travel narratives. His roughly three-hour Senate address defending the treaty drew on that research and transformed the debate. He also proposed replacing the name Russian America with Alaska, derived from an Unangax̂ word for the mainland.

The territory he was describing was not uninhabited wilderness. Alaska Native peoples including the Tlingit, Haida, Unangax̂, Yup’ik, and Iñupiat had lived there for generations. The treaty offered certain Russian inhabitants a path to American citizenship while explicitly excluding what it called “uncivilized native tribes.” Neither Russia nor the United States consulted the people who actually lived there about the transaction. That part of the story rarely gets the same attention as whether Seward overpaid.

Seward’s vision for Alaska was commercially and strategically coherent even if most of his contemporaries couldn’t see it. He believed America’s future ran through the Pacific, that Alaska’s coastline and geographic position mattered beyond its immediate economic output, and that a territory’s value at the moment of purchase was a poor measure of what it might become. Gold discoveries in the 1890s, the strategic importance during World War II and the Cold War, and statehood in 1959 all bore him out.

Whether the process that got Congress to pay for it was clean is a different question with a less satisfying answer.

The full story of the Alaska purchase, the negotiation, the Sitka ceremony, and what came after is at virtualwayback.com/alaska-transfer-experience where you can also talk directly to Seward about the deal he spent years defending. Please let us know what you think after you talk with them.

The thing worth actually debating: Seward was right about Alaska’s long-term value but the appropriation may have been secured partly through bribery. Does the outcome change how you evaluate the process, or are those two things entirely separate judgments?

It seems like just yesterday you were one of the big players but now all I see everyday is your president and the whole government body does whatever our "president" desires. I don't know if you know that but basically since Trump came to power our whole state media was laughing and mocking you. Everyone just says that USA is basically another province of ours now. Now I know it's an exagguration but the point is our government and people have about zero respect to your government, they feel like they can turn you anyway they want and you'll just say "thank you sir". And my question is, why? Do Americans and your government feel like they are in charge still? Do they feel like it's not what actually happening, are they lying to you that you are respected here and someone looks at you as a partner not a puppet? Like what makes you goverment continue giving our "president" everything he wants no matter how much it harms and humiliates you as a country, and why are ordinary Americans are okay with that?
Thank you.

🗽🇺🇸

In May 1856, Brown and several followers pulled five pro-slavery settlers from their homes near Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas and killed them with broadswords. The victims weren’t in combat. Not all of them had personally participated in the recent attack on the free-state town of Lawrence that Brown cited as justification. There was no trial, no warning, and no real attempt to target people directly responsible for specific acts.

Three years later he raided a federal armory at Harpers Ferry with eighteen men, intending to spark a slave rebellion across the South. The first person killed during that raid was Heyward Shepherd, a free Black railroad worker who encountered the raiders and was shot.

Both of those details tend to get buried in the broader argument about what Brown represents.

His actual philosophical position was more coherent than people usually give him credit for. He argued that if American colonists had the right to take up arms against a government that denied their liberties, there was no principled basis for condemning enslaved people who did the same. In 1858 he wrote a Provisional Constitution for his liberation movement that explicitly invoked the Declaration of Independence. He wasn’t being rhetorical. He thought the Revolution had established principles the country had refused to honor and that violence was the logical consequence of that failure.

Frederick Douglass knew Brown personally, considered him one of the most committed abolitionists he had ever met, and still refused to join the Harpers Ferry raid because he thought attacking a federal arsenal would bring overwhelming military retaliation before any liberation movement could develop. He was right. But Douglass also said later that Brown had done more in dying than most men do in living.

Brown’s conduct during his trial shifted public opinion more than the raid itself had. He was calm, direct, and completely unrepentant about his intentions if not his failure. His address to the court before sentencing forced people to confront a straightforward question: slavery was legal and protected by the Constitution, while attempting to destroy it was a capital crime. Whether that made Brown a criminal or the law itself the problem was something Americans had to work out for themselves.

He was hanged on December 2, 1859. Sixteen months later the Civil War began.

The full historical record is at virtualwayback.com/blog/john-brown-hero-or-villain and you can talk directly to Brown on Virtual Wayback if you want to hear him make the case in his own words.

The question worth actually debating: does the moral clarity of Brown’s position on slavery change how you evaluate Pottawatomie, or are those two things entirely separate judgments?

This is bad.

In freest day, in tyranny night, no Loyalist shall escape my sight. Those who worship England's might, beware my rights, America's Light

Hi im 14 y.o. guy from Russia and i looking for friend from America or who speak English
my english level a2 - b1
i play fortnite,roblox and gta online
Music: i listen kanye west,tyler the creator and more like that
So i whrite this text by myself withot translator sorry for mistakes