"Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. John L. Burns, the 'old hero of Gettysburg,' with gun and crutches" Photo by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, July 1863.

During the Battle of Gettysburg, [John L.] Burns, a 70-year-old civilian living nearby, grabbed his flintlock musket and powder horn and walked out to the battlefield to join in with Union troops. The soldiers took him in, and Burns served well as a sharpshooter. During a withdrawal, Burns was wounded several times and left on the field. he managed to get himself to safety, his wounds were treated, and his story elevated him to the status of National Hero briefly.

The Atlantic

Wonder Women: 1942

August 1942. “Formerly a sociology major at the University of Southern California, Mrs. Eloise J. Ellis (left) now “keeps ‘em flyin’” at the Naval Air Base, Corpus Christi, Texas. She is a supervisor under civil service in the Assembly and Repair Department. It is her job to maintain morale among the women by helping them solve housing and other personal problems. With her is Jo Ann Whittington, an NYA trainee at the plant.” Large format Kodachrome transparency by Howard Hollem for the Office of War Information.

Shorpy Historical Photo Archive

Robert Smalls was born on Ashdale Plantation on Lady’s Island, South Carolina. As a descendent of Guinea slaves, Smalls was hired as a deckhand on the CSS Planter, an armed Confederate military transport in 1861. He served under Brigadier General Roswell Ripley, commander of the Second Military District of South Carolina. Smalls was promoted to pilot of the Planter within a year.

On May 12, 1862, the Planter’s officers decided to have the crew spend the night ashore. In the early morning hours, Smalls, then 23, commandeered Planter. At that time, the ship was loaded with weapons and equipment for the rebel forts. Along with seven of the eight enslaved crewmen, Smalls stopped by a nearby wharf to pick up Smalls’ wife, children and twelve relatives of the other crewmen. They sailed towards the nearest Union blockading ship, Onward, with a raised white flag. Dressed in a captain’s uniform, Smalls reported shouted, “Good morning, sir! I have brought you some of the old United States’ guns, sir!”

Regarded as a national hero in the north, Smalls and his associates were given prize money from President Lincoln for their efforts and information regarding rebel locations. Smalls continued to fight in the Civil War for the Union and became the first black captain of a United States vessel. After the war, he learned to read and write and participated in the drafting of South Carolina’s state constitution. Smalls went on to serve five terms as a U.S. Congressman representing South Carolina. He moved back to Beaufort, South Carolina and served for nearly 20 years as U.S. Collector of Customs and lived, as the owner, in the same house in which he had been a slave.

Further Reading
The Atlantic
Robert Smalls on the Biographical Directory of the US Congress
RobertSmalls.org

Written on April 13, 1989, this letter was sent from second-grader Kelli Middlestead of the Franklin School in Burlingame, California, to Walter Stieglitz the Regional Director of the Alaska Region of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, lamenting the Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 24, 1989.

National Archives

Timothy H. O'Sullivan, photographer; printed by Alexander Gardner; negative July 4, 1863; print 1866.

Of the Civil War photographs, the most moving are the inhumanly objective records of combat deaths. Perhaps the most reproduced of these Civil War photographs is [Timothy] O’Sullivan’s A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863. Although this image could be seen as simple reportage, is also functions to impress on people the high price of the Civil War. Corpses litter the battlefield as far as the eye can see. O’Sullivan presented a scene that stretches far to the horizon. As the photograph modulates from the precise clarity of the bodies of Union soldiers in the foreground, boots stolen and pockets picked, to the almost illegible corpses in the distance, the suggestion of innumerable other dead soldiers is unavoidable. . . . Though it was years before photolithography could reproduce photographs like this in newspapers, they were publicly exhibited and made an impression that newsprint engravings never could.

- Gardner’s Art Through the Ages

Fred S. Kleiner & Christin J. Mamiya, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, Twelfth Edition: Volume II, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2005, 850.
Photo via The J. Paul Getty Museum website.

Riders ready to race, Daytona Beach, Florida, March 1948. (Joseph Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

“For years, from its inception in 1937 until the early ’60s, the prestigious Daytona 200 motorcycle race wasn’t merely run at Daytona Beach. Along with other high-speed, high-risk clashes, the 200 was run on Daytona Beach.”

"Norman Teleford (No. 161) streamlines himself during a motorcycle race at Daytona Beach, March 1948." (Joseph Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

“In 1948, LIFE magazine covered the races, both amateur and pro, at Daytona (the Road Course opened in 1936) and reported, in its April 19 issue, that ‘for four days last month the resort city of Daytona Beach could hardly have been noisier — or in more danger — if it had been under bombardment.’”

“Now, with unpublished and rarely seen photos by Joseph Scherschel (brother of another LIFE photographer, Frank Scherschel), LIFE.com opens a window on a long, loud weekend 70 years ago: a weekend that thrilled racing fans; and — as if proof was needed that the young sport was still in the hands of rebels and scofflaws — saw two people killed and 30 more injured in the midst of all the high-octane fun.”

A racer and his bike violently part company in March 1948. Quite often nothing but a narrow strip of sand separated riders from spectators when the Daytona races were in full swing. (Joseph Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

“The 1948 event, which attracted “375 helmeted daredevils and plenty of non-racing hell-raisers,” was marred not only by deaths and injuries but, as LIFE duly noted, by classic knuckleheadism. “Because the antics of an unruly minority reflect on the dignity of motorcycling,” the magazine observed, “the American Motorcycle Association may hire special police at future races. One duty will be to restrain sophomoric cyclists who amused themselves this year by tossing firecrackers into the crowd.”

“Ultimately, as LIFE tersely reported, “155 motorcycles started, only 45 finished. Winning rider, Floyd Emde, averaged 84 mph, got $2,000.” What LIFE failed to mention is that Emde (who was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1998) won by the sliver-thin margin of 12 seconds; 1948 was the first time a rider led the race from flag to flag; and it was the last time an Indian Motorcycle won the 200.”

Floyd Emde rests on his Indian motorcycle after winning the 1948 running of the Daytona 200. (Joseph Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

LIFE

Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

“Thirsty young football players drink water from a garden hose in Denver, Colorado, in 1939.”

LIFE

Despite the best efforts of authorities, Seattle remained “wet” during Prohibition. Here, King County Sheriff Matt Starwich destroys bottles of confiscated alcohol, ca. 1925.

(University of Washington Library Digital Collections, found here).

Amnon Weinstein prepares a violin from the Holocaust for exhibit. He began restoring the violins in 1996 and now has 30 of them to display in an exhibit called "Violins of Hope."

Amnon Weinstein first encountered a violin from the Holocaust 50 years ago. He was a young violin maker in Israel, and a customer brought him an old instrument in terrible condition and wanted it restored.

The customer had played on the violin on the way to the gas chamber, but he survived because the Germans needed him for their death camp orchestra. He hadn’t played on it since.

“So I opened the violin, and there inside there [were] ashes,” Weinstein says.

Weinstein was horrified; were these incinerated remnants of concentration camp victims? The Nazis plucked Jewish musicians from arriving cattle cars and forced them to play as other prisoners went to their death. Hundreds of Weinstein’s relatives — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — died in the Holocaust. To handle one of those instruments was too much.

“I could not. I could not,” he says.

It was many decades later in 1996, when Weinstein was ready. He put out a call for violins from the Holocaust. One came from a survivor who played in the Auschwitz Men’s Orchestra.

UNC Charlotte music professor David Russell plays a violin that belonged to a member of the Auschwitz Men's Orchestra.

On a recent day, the violin was being played by David Russell, a music professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Russell and Weinstein are old friends, which is how Charlotte came to host the North American debut of Violins of Hope. Eighteen instruments are here; Russell says each carries the touch and playing style of its previous owner.

“When I play one of these instruments, I go through that same process of discovering what makes this instrument sound the best,” Russell says. “That means that I’m walking in their footsteps and their voice is actually heard by my playing of this violin.”

The violin was perhaps the most important instrument for the Jewish people, Weinstein says. He has restored more than 30 Holocaust violins, and many are inlaid with an intricate Star of David in mother-of-pearl. Orthodox Judaism forbade displaying portraits or sculpture, so Weinstein says violins often hung as art on the walls.

“Never [would you] see a Jewish house without an instrument on the wall. It was a kind of tradition,” he says.

Weinstein began collecting these violins to honor that tradition, but also to break the silence: His family never spoke of the Holocaust. Once, he asked about his grandfather and says his mother silently opened a book about the war and pointed to a pile of bodies.

The Auschwitz Men's Orchestra is seen here in an undated photo. Jewish musicians were forced to perform in Nazi concentration camps.

Weinstein then married Assi Bielski, whose father was a famous Jewish resistance fighter portrayed in the film Defiance. Weinstein was amazed how happily the Bielski family talked about the war.

“We are completely different in this way,” he says. “Her family killed Germans, by quantities, not by one. My family was all killed by the Germans.”

Bielski says her family was always very happy, and they were not humiliated.

“It’s the number tattooed on your arm that is a constant reminder of the humiliation,” Bielski says. “For us there was none of it.”

Weinstein says that perhaps what he’s doing with the violins is to make his life a little bit easier from “all [of] this heritage, which is unbelievable.”

The Violins of Hope are Weinstein’s resistance. They’re like tombstones, he says, for the thousands of Jewish instruments and musicians destroyed in the war.

You can listen to a documentary about Violins of Hope from member station WDAV here

NPR – “Violins of Hope”: Instruments from the Holocaust (found via the-seed-of-europe)

By an unknown photographer, unknown location, December 22, 1943

“A Bell System switchboard where overseas calls are handled. Not all of the services shown here are available under wartime conditions”

The most famous female worker of World War II was the mythical Rosie the Riveter, who patriotically joined the industrial workforce to do her bit in a shipyard or an aircraft factory. There were many real-life Rosies, but many more women worked in service or clerical jobs as secretaries, bank tellers, retail clerks, and telephone operators.

(National Archives, Records of the Women’s Bureau (86-WWT-28-3))

Soldier demonstrates his scar and pierced helmet, during World War I. This photograph would have made ideal propaganda material as its accompanying caption demonstrates. The soldier in the middle of the scene is happy and triumphant. Despite the bandaging on his head, he is still carrying all his equipment and looks ready for action. The story, helmet and resulting scar would probably have provided first rate barrack entertainment! [Original title reads: 'Saved by shrapnell [sic] helmet. This soldier, on the way to hospital after being bandaged at Field Dressing Station, shows the helmet which saved his life.’]

(National Library of Scotland)

Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

The caption that accompanied this image when it appeared in the January 23, 1939, issue of LIFE: “The top box-office star of Warner Bros., in blue slacks, skims through the morning newspapers in the playroom of her home. The walls are decorated with Mexican posters.”

LIFE

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