On this day, February 5, 1885, news reached London that the Mahdists had taken Khartoum and killed General Charles George Gordon. The news would prompt an expedition to rescue Emin Pasha, the Governor of the Egyptian province of Equatoria.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.