On this day in ...... 1946, Trygve Lie (left) of Norway was elected the 1st Secretary-General of the United Nations. A carpenter's son who entered public life through Norway's Labour Party, Lie had served both before and after World War II in a number of in his country's government, among them Minister of Justice, Foreign Minister,
and chief of delegation to the 1945 San Francisco Conference that adopted the U.N. Charter. Lie resigned in 1952 in the face of Soviet opposition triggered by the U.N. role in the Korean War.... 1862, Julia Ward Howe (right) published a poem in the Atlantic Monthly, a periodical in circulation to this day. Entitled "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," it left little doubt but that in the author's view that in the Civil War it was the Union enjoyed divine approval. Emblematic is the concluding stanza of what would become an American anthem:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Notably, Howe equated the Union cause with her own cause, the abolition of slavery, though President Abraham Lincoln would not move toward even partial emancipation for another 9 months, as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has detailed in her Team of Rivals (2005). (image credit)
