Just two days ago the world got to see an extraordinary bit of buried history. The contents of a time capsule laid by Princess Diana in 1991 at the Great Ormond Street hospital were announced. The announcement prompted this lover of forgotten history think about time capsules, repositories of history that are, actually, history themselves.
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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.