Tenzing Norgay and his climbing partner Edmund Hillary became the first people to verifiably summit the tallest mountain on Earth on May 29th, 1953. And yet despite that high bar, Tenzing and Hillary are not the only ones to have taken important steps on this day 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.