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American history, reported as it happened
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19591776 Club

Mamie Eisenhower christens the world's first nuclear cargo ship

The teardrop-hulled Savannah carries a swimming pool, a 74-megawatt reactor, and a president's argument for peaceful atoms.

By 1959, "nuclear" mostly meant bomb tests and bunker drills to most Americans. At New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden, New Jersey, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower christened a different kind of nuclear vessel: the NS Savannah, a $46.9 million cargo-passenger ship built to run on a pressurized-water reactor instead of oil. It was the second nuclear-powered civilian vessel in the world, after the Soviet icebreaker Lenin, the first nuclear-powered civilian ship. The ship would not enter service for three more years, but it was already designed to argue that nuclear power could carry people, not just warheads…

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More from July 21
1861

Green troops collide at Bull Run; the Union army breaks and runs for Washington

Spectators drove out from the capital with picnic baskets to watch; they fled home in the same traffic jam as the soldiers.
1997

Old Ironsides sails again; Cronkite takes the helm off Marblehead

The 1797 frigate moves under her own canvas for the first time in 116 years, on sails paid for through a national campaign of citizen and student donations.
1944

Marines and soldiers storm Guam's beaches, opening a three-week fight to retake it

Two and a half years after its surrender, the island is under American naval gunfire again.
19491776 Club
Twelve nations bound themselves to treat an attack on one as an attack on all.
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Read the full July 21 edition →Everything that happened on July 21 →
More from Cold War America
1950

North Korean guns open on the 38th parallel at dawn; Seoul has no tanks to stop them

Kim Il Sung's forces pour south into an almost entirely unprepared country; the U.N. Security Council condemns the invasion, and Truman moves toward committing U.S. troops.
1948

Clay orders supply flights into Tempelhof; the question now is whether the air can feed two million

Stalin sealed every land route into West Berlin days ago, betting the Allies would negotiate their way out rather than try to sustain a city from the sky.
1950

Truman orders air and sea forces to Korea; the UN backs a unified command under American leadership

Seoul fell yesterday, and the Security Council voted hours ago, but the question in Washington was never whether to act, only how fast.
1950

American fighters meet North Korean Yaks above Suwon; three shot down, none lost

F-82s and F-80Cs scrambled to cover civilian evacuation flights out of Seoul, two days after North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel.
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