In 1811, a plantation owner in Spanish East Florida signed a manumission paper, officially freeing his 18-year-old wife, a Senegalese woman. He assured Spanish authorities of her “nicety and fidelity” as well as her “good qualities." Her name was Anna Kingsley. Captured in the endemic violence of west Africa, Anna lived an extraordinary life.
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.