Events

The forward magazines of the USS Maine detonated at 9:40 PM on February 15, 1898, while the battleship sat at anchor in Havana Harbor. The explosion ripped the ship apart, killed 266 of the 354 men aboard, and lit the fuse for a war that would transform the United States from a continental republic into a global empire. Whether the explosion was caused by a Spanish mine or an internal coal fire remains debated more than a century later, but in 1898 the cause mattered far less than the outrage. The Maine had been sent to Havana in January 1898 as a show of force during Cuba’s war of independence against Spain. American newspapers, led by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, had spent two years publishing sensationalized accounts of Spanish atrocities in Cuba. The sinking gave them their greatest headline. "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!" became the rallying cry of a nation already primed for conflict. The US Navy’s initial investigation, conducted in March 1898, concluded that an external mine had caused the explosion. Spain’s own inquiry found the opposite: an internal accident, likely a fire in a coal bunker adjacent to the ammunition magazines. A 1976 investigation by Admiral Hyman Rickover concluded that spontaneous coal combustion was the most likely cause. A 1998 National Geographic study suggested a mine could not be ruled out. The truth may never be established with certainty. Congress declared war on Spain on April 25, 1898. The conflict lasted just over three months. American forces defeated Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. The Treaty of Paris gave the United States control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and established de facto authority over Cuba. In a hundred days of fighting, America acquired an overseas empire spanning two oceans. A mysterious explosion in a Cuban harbor propelled the United States onto the world stage — and the country never stepped back.

Twenty dog sled teams ran a 674-mile relay across frozen Alaska in a blizzard to deliver 300,000 units of diphtheria antitoxin to the isolated town of Nome, arriving on February 2, 1925 — five and a half days after the serum left Nenana. The temperature dropped to minus 40 degrees. Visibility was zero in whiteout conditions. The final leg was run by a Norwegian musher named Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog, a black Siberian husky named Balto, who found the trail by scent when his driver could not see his own hands. Nome in January 1925 was icebound and unreachable by ship or airplane. When Dr. Curtis Welch diagnosed diphtheria in several children and realized the town’s antitoxin supply had expired, he faced a nightmare: a highly contagious disease in a remote community of 1,400 people with 455 children, the nearest serum supply 1,000 miles away in Anchorage, and no way to get it there except by dogsled along the Iditarod Trail. The territorial governor organized a relay of the best mushers in Alaska. A train carried the serum from Anchorage to Nenana, the end of the rail line. From there, twenty mushers and their teams carried the 20-pound cylinder of serum in stages through some of the harshest conditions on earth. Wind chill temperatures reached minus 85 degrees. Several mushers suffered frostbite. One team crossed Norton Sound on sea ice in a gale, with the dogs running blind. Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo covered the most dangerous stretch, 91 miles across the exposed ice of Norton Sound. Kaasen and Balto completed the final 53 miles, arriving in Nome at 5:30 AM on February 2. The serum was frozen but still viable. Dr. Welch administered it immediately, and the outbreak was contained. Five children had already died, but the epidemic was prevented. Balto became the most famous dog in America, immortalized in a statue in New York’s Central Park, though mushers who knew the trail always argued that Seppala’s Togo was the real hero of the run.