In 1836, President Andrew Jackson received a surprising gift in the form of an enormous wheel of cheese. Of course a huge presidential cheese might occasion comment in and of itself, but perhaps even more surprisingly, it wasn’t even the first ridiculously large wheel of cheese delivered to an American president.
In August of 1918, as the armies of Europe neared exhaustion, American troops of the 28th “Keystone” division were thrown into a nearly forgotten battle that fully represented the horrors of the War to End All Wars.
Of the vaunted ironclad warships of the US Civil War perhaps the mightiest and most terrifying was the confederate ram Tennessee. On August 5, 1864, she would be put to the test in the largest naval engagement of the war, an engagement that defined the divided loyalties of the War of the Rebellion.