Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesTuesday, October 13
From the desk
Start with 1976: Atlanta, a sample from an outbreak already killing hundreds in Sudan and Zaire, and an electron microscope that finally gave the disease a shape. Fred Murphy and Alyne Harrison looked at long filamentous strands nobody recognized, and Ebola had a face before it had a name. Also worth your time: 1812, when Isaac Brock died charging up Queenston Heights and New York militia simply refused to cross the river, leaving the trapped Americans to surrender by afternoon. A navy got its start the same week in 1775, with no ships and no treasury behind it.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1976Featured · This day in history
A thread-like shape appears under the electron microscope in Atlanta
By October 1976, hemorrhagic fever had already killed hundreds across southern Sudan and northern Zaire, and nobody at the CDC could say for certain what was causing it. On October 13, in a lab in Atlanta, virologist Fred Murphy and his colleague Alyne Harrison aimed an electron microscope at a sample from the outbreak and got their answer. The image showed long, filamentous strands unlike anything in the usual hemorrhagic-fever catalog. The virus had a shape, and soon it had a name: Ebola.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GeorgiaStory page →
The American Throughline
The CDC's identification of Ebola helped establish the American public health system as a global reference point for naming and classifying emerging viruses. Murphy's image became the template electron microscopists worldwide still compare new filoviruses against. Atlanta's lab, not a hospital in Kinshasa or Khartoum, became the place the virus was first truly seen.
Did you know
QWhat credentials did Fred Murphy hold before he ever looked at an Ebola sample?
Murphy arrived at the CDC with a veterinary science background rather than a strictly medical one. He earned a bachelor's degree and a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Cornell University, then added a PhD from the University of California, Davis. That combination of animal disease training and advanced virology research shaped his later leadership roles at the CDC, including stints as Director of the Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases and Director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases. After retiring from federal service in 2015, he carried that expertise into academia as professor emeritus of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. His path to the Ebola image ran through veterinary medicine, not a hospital ward.
QHow many peer-reviewed papers came out of Murphy's career after the Ebola discovery?
Murphy's publication record runs past 250 peer-reviewed journal articles, a body of work built across decades studying rabies and hemorrhagic fevers alongside his Ebola work. That output, plus his leadership positions inside the CDC's viral disease divisions, earned him numerous professional honors over his career. He also stayed active in professional organizations and committees well beyond the Atlanta lab bench. The 1976 micrograph remains his best-known image, but it is one entry among more than 250 papers.
QWhat institution did the CDC grow out of before it became a public health agency in Atlanta?
The CDC traces its origin to the Malaria Control in War Areas program, a World War II-era operation aimed at controlling mosquito-borne disease near military bases in the American South. That program was formally reorganized into the Centers for Disease Control on July 1, 1946, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Three decades later, the same agency's virology division was where a sample from Central Africa ended up under an electron microscope. The CDC's founding mission was regional and wartime in scope; by 1976 it had become the reference laboratory fielding cables from missionary hospitals overseas.
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1775military
Congress votes to buy two ships and go after British supply boats
Boston sat under British martial law, and George Washington had already started commandeering ships on his own authority to choke off the Crown's supply lines. On October 13, 1775, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia authorized the purchase and arming of two vessels to cruise against British merchantmen, and formed a three-member Naval Committee to oversee them. It was a modest start, backed by a government with no treasury and no warships of its own. Within weeks the committee grew to seven members, and a navy existed where days earlier there had been none.
Congress had no money and no shipyards, and plenty of delegates thought the idea absurd. It voted anyway. That gamble on two borrowed-money merchant ships became the institutional root of the United States Navy, which traces its official birthday to this exact vote: a government deciding it needed a fleet before it had a flag.
1812military
Brock falls storming the Heights; his redcoats rally and the stranded Americans surrender
Four months into the war, the United States tried to seize a foothold on the Canadian side of the Niagara River before winter closed the campaign. On October 13, 1812, Major General Stephen Van Rensselaer sent regulars and militia across from Lewiston to Queenston, where British regulars, Canadian militia, and Mohawk warriors under John Norton met them. British commander Isaac Brock was killed leading a counterattack up the Heights; his successor, Roger Hale Sheaffe, brought up reinforcements and surrounded the Americans. With New York militia refusing to cross the river to reinforce them, the trapped American force surrendered by afternoon.
Queenston Heights exposed a flaw that haunted the United States through the whole war: militia could be marched to a border but not legally compelled to cross it. That reluctance, not British strength alone, doomed the invasion of Canada and became one of the war's early lessons about relying on citizen-soldiers for offensive campaigns.
Did you know
QWhat specific artillery did the British have positioned beyond the main guns at Queenston village?
Beyond the nine-pounder near the guardhouse and the redan's eighteen-pounder and eight-inch mortar, the British had placed additional guns at Vrooman's Point and Brown's Point, spreading coverage along the Niagara frontier rather than concentrating it at the obvious crossing point. This dispersed arrangement meant no single American landing site escaped fire, even though it also meant Brock's overall force was thin at any one spot on October 13. The redundancy in gun placement reflected how seriously British engineers had studied the river's likely crossing points before the war ever began. Queenston was defended by layers, not a single battery.
QWhat were the actual regiment numbers of the American infantry that crossed at Queenston?
The landing force drew specifically from the 6th, 13th, and 23rd Infantry Regiments, backed by several New York militia regiments and a body of volunteer riflemen. Naming the units this way shows the invasion was not a single cohesive army but a patchwork pulled from different regular regiments stitched together with state militia for one operation. That patchwork quality mattered once fighting started: regulars and militia trained differently, answered to different officers, and had different willingness to press an attack once things went wrong. The regiment numbers survive in the record as a reminder of how improvised the whole Niagara campaign was.
QWhy did the United States formally declare war on Britain in the first place, months before Queenston?
Congress declared war on June 18, 1812, citing two grievances: British restrictions on American trade with Napoleonic France and the Royal Navy's practice of impressment, seizing sailors off American vessels and forcing them into British service. Britain's own war aims at the time were narrow, focused on protecting Canada and maritime rights without pulling resources from the fight against Napoleon in Europe. That mismatch, a full American declaration against a limited British defensive posture, meant the United States was fighting for conquest while Britain was fighting only to hold on. Queenston was the first place that mismatch played out on a battlefield.
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Quote of the day
“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.”
