December 7, 1941 is the day the attack on Pearl Harbor took place. A day later The United States and Great Britain declared war on Japan. World War two now had its two largest combatants fully engaged. The war would intensify as man’s inhumanity to man scaled new and scientific heights.

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

It was around 9:30 in the morning when then president Franklin Delano Roosevelt went before the Congress to request a formal declaration of war against Japan. He gave a speech about the sad destruction of the pacific fleet the day before. His address was broadcast over every radio and school loud speaker in the country.

The nation listened in mourning still dumbfounded by yesterday’s brutal attack. 1,500 people were dead and 1,500 people were injured. The planes, boats, ships and artillery at the Pearl Harbor military installation lay in ruins. It seemed to many an unprovoked attack on a “neutral” nation.

The United States had been assisting its old allies Britain and France with weapons and funds since the beginning of the war in 1939. So soon after the end of the Great War (914-1918), Britain was ill equipped to wage another campaign. The U.S. had declared itself neutral and Adolph Hitler had stated on several occasions he had no desire to go to war with the United States.

Japan was Germany’s ally and a part of a pact signed in 1940 by Italy, Germany and Japan that stated if a country (namely the United States) attacked one of the pact members they were automatically at war with the other two members.

There are several theories that the attack on Pearl Harbor was planned to ensure American involvement in World War II. FDR had pledged to the American people they would not become involved but he had informed Great Britain that he would support a war against Germany. No matter the cause, the attack the day before was to bring America into the war against Germany and all her allies.

Less than half an hour after FDR finished his speech and he request for a declaration of war, Congress passed a resolution to enter a state of war with Japan. The vote was unanimous. A similar vote in the house had only one vote against. Before lunch on December 8, 1941 America was at war.

American involvement with Japan would last until August of 1945 when two atomic bombs were dropped by the United States on the Japanese towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost 200,000 people died as a result of the attacks. Japan, a thus far ruthless and determined opponent surrendered and one of history’s bloodiest wars came to an end.

The day America declared war on Japan is one example of the day after. The day after history is often forgotten; what occurred after the dramatic change. But it is the day after that pushed history forward and gave us the world we enjoy today.

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Few books have played such a large role in history as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, except perhaps the Bible and the Koran. Published on November 24, 1859, Darwin’s book discussed such new ideas as natural selection, the survival of the fittest and of course, the natural evolutionary progression of homo sapiens. This non religious version of reality sparked a controversy that the world had never known.

Darwin’s research for the book had taken place on the HMS Beagle years before. As he traveled to the Galapagos Islands and other exotic places, he made observations on the nature of environment and the effect of climate on the development of species. He had a theory that animals were not merely created by an invisible being but they progressed along a very long line of evolution. Their “origins” were in the prehistoric world. Pure heresy of course.

That may be why it took Darwin several years before he spoke and wrote publicly on his theory of evolution. The first edition consisted of only 1, 250 copies. A second printing took place in December adding an additional 3,000 copies as well as a German translation to the controversy.

For forward thinking Victorians, Darwin’s book was the must have item of the year. Those who embraced the humanist enlightenment sentiments of the previous century felt compelled to explore such new “scientific” ideas. Science was on the rise in the mid to late 19^th century and the scientific method found favor among academics.

There was talk of a knighthood for Darwin before the church interposed. Darwin’s peers reacted in one of two ways: in favor or against the concept that man was descended from apes. Less than a year after the book was published, the term “Darwinism” was coined.

This was the era of tea rooms and private clubs, public libraries and the graduation of public space into a permanent part of society. Many people didn’t quite understand the concept as it was still so new, but it didn’t stop them from trying. The book was read and debated, sparked both cries of heresy and cries of progress. Darwin had changed human perception forever, cast doubt into tightly fixed views. Pulled a Copernicus if you will.

If you were alive in 1859, you had heard of Darwin’s book on the natural order of things. And of course, if you are alive today, You’ve probably heard of it too. Charles Darwin’s theories have enjoyed over a century of debate and study. Despite the fossil record, the work of anthropologists and the logical nature of the idea, many still refuse to accept Darwin’s theories. Because of this, there seems no let up in the debate or argument that started over 140 years ago. Sometimes a book is more than a book. Sometimes it’s the start of an historical movement.

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The plague took the lives of million of Europeans from the 14^th until the 17^th century. In England, its destruction stayed mainly in the south of England concentrating around the poor quarters of London. But for one small village in England’s rural north, the plague would be devastating and historic. The case of the small village of Eyam in Derbyshire is famed throughout England and serves in the modern age of an example of the importance of self quarantine in the face of deadly disease.

It all began with the decision of the village tailor, George Viccars to purchase a box of fabric from a London dealer and bring it to Eyam to make clothes for the locals. Viccars didn’t know the box was full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague. Three days later he was dead.

The village knew plague when they saw it and drastic action was taken to ensure it didn’t spread outside of the village. The village went into self induced quarantine under the guidance of the retired vicar and the serving vicar. They asked the villagers to make this sacrifice to save the lives of everyone else. The villages made the difficult moral decision and complied.

The next few months were hard, families, men, women and children became sick and died. One woman lost her husband and six children within the space of a single week. The village lived with the disease throughout September and October of 1665, minimizing contact with each other, receiving provisions from neighboring villages who left food for them at the town boundaries and holding all public ceremonies outside to minimize the spread of the illness.

During that time, the small village of Eyam with a population of approximately 700 people lost 260 of its inhabitants to the plague. The plague affected 76 different families and wiped out a few of them forever. Many households had only a single survivor who lived to tell the tale of those terrible months.

Many people did survive and they recorded the histories and passings of their neighbors on the front of their home and these records still exist. All the villagers learned how to bury their neighbors, friends and family members. It was a time unimaginable for most of us today as these simple country folk showed a spirit of community almost gone in these modern times.

Today, Eyam pays homage to those that lost their lives in 1665 with a plague museum as well as plaques on the house of the victims. The cemetery still keeps their bones and the locals still hold testament to their title of England’s “plague village.” They may have not realized it at the time but those few deaths became famed throughout England, making their way into every child’s schoolbook and taught as an example of ill fate.

Eyam was just one small village of the hundreds affected by the bubonic plague but its history provides a glimpse into the lives of its survivors and victims, making the epidemic more than just statistics of people who live long ago but a testament of human endurance and the belief in the sacrifice of a few to save the lives of many.

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As hundreds of scientists from around the world were conscripted in the Manhattan Project during the thick of Word War II, the best and brightest were passed along to the top-secret research site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the secrets of the world’s first atom bomb would soon be unlocked.

Though the US Army heavily patrolled the site and sensitive documents were kept under lock and key, Los Alamos was far from leak proof. The researchers themselves, highly prized for their brilliance and unique areas of expertise, could not be explicitly ruled out of service due to any supposed political leanings. Even the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” Robert Oppenheimer, was known to keep company with known Communists and under surveillance by the FBI during his involvement in the project.

Meanwhile, another Los Alamos team member, theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, while a staunch anti-fascist, had been a member of the Communist Party in his native Germany. After fleeing to Britain to escape the Nazis, he was loaned out to the Manhattan Project in 1943 and, in short order, became a valuable asset to the team. To this day, Fuchs is credited with several key calculations that would prove essential to making the bomb a reality.

After the project disbanded in 1946, however, Fuchs switched sides and spent the next two years passing secrets to Soviets that included a method for refining uranium and diagrams for the construction of a hydrogen bomb. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency was projecting that the Soviets would be incapable of going nuclear until the mid-1950s. When the USSR conducted their first successful atomic test in 1949, a stunned President Truman initially declared that the explosion must have been an “accident.”

Fuchs was exposed the following year after US Intelligence decrypted messages implicating him as a traitor. He confessed immediately, leading to a rash of similar revelations from other Los Alamos workers. An Army corporal who worked the base, David Greenglass, revealed that he too sold secrets to the Soviets, including schematics of Fat Man, the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. In strange confluence of events, he was able to receive a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against his own sister and her husband — who happened to be none other than Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Both were found guilty and executed, sparking one of the opening salvos of the Cold War and leading to a controversy that lingers to this day.

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