October 23 · This Day in America
Just before dawn, a yellow truck speeds past the sentries at the U.S. Marine compound at Beirut airport, drives into the lobby of the headquarters building, and detonates. The blast — among the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded to that point — collapses the four-story structure onto the men sleeping inside. Two hundred forty-one American service members are killed: 220 Marines, 18 sailors, 3 soldiers. They had come to Lebanon as peacekeepers in someone else's civil war. It remains the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima. Across the country the names are read, the flags lowered, the families handed folded cloth. The mission ended within months, but the grief did not, and neither did the questions. We tell this one straight, without spin, because the men who died at reveille that morning are owed exactly that: remembrance, and the truth.
Source: www.britannica.com
Also on this day · 1915
Dressed in white, carrying banners that read "You trust us with the children; trust us with the vote," an enormous column of women — and some men — marches roughly three miles up Fifth Avenue in the largest suffrage parade the country has yet seen. The New York referendum that followed failed. They marched again anyway. Two years later New York said yes, and in 1920 so did the nation.
Source: www.loc.gov