If you enjoy an occasional cocktail, you likely have heard, at some time or another, the origin stories for some of your favorite mixed drinks. But you might not know that for most of these drinks, someone else somewhere else is telling a different origin story. In fact, there is even dispute over the origin of the word cocktail.
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.