August 31 · This Day in America
At about 9:50 on a hot Tuesday night, the ground under Charleston, South Carolina, heaves and roars. It is the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the eastern United States, an estimated magnitude near 7, and it should not, by everything science then believes, be happening here at all. Chimneys snap by the thousands. Streets buckle and split. Sand and water erupt from the earth in fountains as the soil itself turns to liquid. The shock is felt in Boston, in Chicago, in Cuba and Bermuda — a continent away people feel their floors sway. Scores die; nearly every building in the city is wounded. For years afterward Charlestonians sleep in tents and parks, listening to aftershocks roll through the dark. The lesson endures: the country sits on older, stranger ground than it likes to believe, and the earth keeps its own counsel.
Source: earthquake.usgs.gov
Also on this day · 2021
Just before midnight Kabul time, the final U.S. Air Force C-17 lifts off from the airport, and America's longest war — nearly twenty years, begun in the smoke of September 11 — comes to its end. A night-vision photograph captures the very last soldier, Major General Chris Donahue, stepping alone onto the ramp. No bands, no banners. Just one man, walking up into the dark and the engines, closing a door two decades in the making.
Source: www.npr.org