SYNOPSIS: This essay presents an exploration of the evolution of the concept of nostalgia from its inception in the late 17th century to its modern interpretation in the 21st century. By chronicling the path of nostalgia from chronic ailment to evolutionary benefit, it explores nostalgia and its juxtaposition within American history.

Also known as Custer’s Last Stand, this battle in southeastern Montana represented a defeat for US forces in the Great Sioux War of 1876.

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Jordanian-born busboy, shot the presidential hopeful in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as the senator was celebrating his victory in the California Democratic primary. Kennedy died the next day.

Angela Davis, a Marxist professor at UCLA, was jailed for her alleged involvement in a 1970 conspiracy that resulted in four fatalities in an armed takeover of a California courtroom. She was eventually acquitted and released.

There was no joy in Mudville when mighty Casey struck out, according to “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888.” Ernest Thayer’s iconic poem made its debut in the San Francisco Examiner, omitting eighteen lines originally suggesting Casey threw the game to benefit an uncle who was betting on the outcome. Though “Casey” is a fictional character, a player named Dan Casey was at the time pitching for the Philadelphia Quakers.

Frances Folsom was 21 when she married the 49-yeqr-old Grover Cleveland, making her the youngest First Lady in US history. Widower Woodrow Wilson would also marry his second wife while in office, but the Cleveland-Folsom ceremony in the East Room was the only presidential knot-tying to take place within the White House itself.

Celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the City of Chicago, this two-year World’s Fair paid tribute to modern innovation, as evidenced by the two Zeppelin-like airships surveying the scene.

The catastrophic flood that destroyed Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889 soon became a familiar subject for amusement park dioramas. Thousands of curious spectators thronged to this “spectacle” at Coney Island, which opened in 1902 after being moved from the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

Memorial Day (also known as Decoration Day) was established in 1868 to honor the fallen soldiers of the Civil War. It was traditionally celebrated on May 30 until 1967, when the observance was moved to the fourth Monday in May.

The 35th US President was born in Brookline, a suburb of Boston.

Abolitionist sentiment was strong in Massachusetts during the Civil War, as depicted in this 1943 mural in Washington’s Recorder of Deeds Building.

Like the Brooklyn Bridge 3,000 miles to the east, the Golden Gate bridge stands as a sublime example of engineering know-how and aspirational thinking.

If, as they say, America is a melting pot, then Halloween is its seething witchly cauldron, a macabre mashup, a hobgoblined hobnob of Celtic mythology, German hexerei, and Transylvanian folklore, with a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of Victorian Gothic and Hollywood horror thrown in.

The first of US President to be impeached, Andrew Johnson remained in office only because the Senate declined to convict him by a vote of 35-19, one ballot shy of the two-thirds majority needed to remove.

Between 1908 and 1927, some 15 million Model T’s rolled off the assembly line, bringing affordable four-wheeled horsepower to the masses. The popular cars continued to be workhorses in Depression-era America.

Images of Harry Houdini

Bicycling was an immensely popular pastime and spectator sport during the post-Civil War era. Boston’s first race took place in Beacon Park on this date in 1878, the same year Albert Pope started manufacturing them nearby.

Long romanticized by gangster wannabes, Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and her husband Clyde Champion Barrow were two of the most notorious “public enemies” during the Depression years.

More than four years after their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright were granted a U.S. Patent 821,393 for “new and useful improvement in Flying Machines.” A glider, not a motorized aircraft, was depicted in the drawings they submitted with their application.