It is rather astounding how much has happened on April 29. Luckily, we have a way to describe that, owing to the April 29, 1852 publication of the first edition of British lexicographer Peter Mark Roget’s thesaurus. April 29 is a huge, great, gigantic, enormous, massive, colossal, mammoth, immense, stupendous, tremendous date in history.
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.