Near the end of a weeklong national salute to Americans who
served in the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial 
was dedicated in Washington, D.C. after a march to its site by
thousands of veterans of the conflict.

The long-awaited memorial was a simple V-shaped black-granite
wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939 Americans who died
in the conflict, arranged in order of death, not rank, as was
common in other memorials.

The designer of the memorial was Maya Lin, a Yale University architecture student who entered a nationwide competition to
create a design for the monument.         
        
        
        
        
        
       
Designer and sculptor Maya Ying Lin (64)

The car wreck.

On November 13, 1974, 28-year-old Karen Silkwood was killed in
a car accident near Crescent, Oklahoma, north of Oklahoma City. Silkwood worked as a technician at a plutonium plant operated
by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and she had been critical of the
plant’s health and safety procedures. In September, she had
complained to the Atomic Energy Commission about unsafe
conditions at the plant (a week before her death, plant monitors
had found that she was contaminated with radioactivity herself),
and the night she died, she was on her way to a meeting with a
union representative and a reporter for The New York Times,
reportedly with a folder full of documents that proved that Kerr-
McGee was acting negligently when it came to worker safety at
the plant. However, no such folder was found in the wreckage
of her car, lending credence to the theory that someone had
forced her off the road to prevent her from telling what she
knew.

Destruction of Hood’s Ordnance train, Georgia Central
Railroad.

On November 12, 1864, Union General William T. Sherman ordered
the business district of Atlanta, Georgia, destroyed before he
embarked on his famous March to the Sea.

Though houses and churches were not targeted, some were
burned nonetheless. Many houses had already been dismantled
by both armies to make way for fortifications. Contrary to
popular myth only forty percent of Atlanta was left in ruins.

William Tecumseh Sherman
(February 8, 1820 – February 14, 1891)

The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, a multi-day battle that would
see more than 1,700 Americans killed, began on this day in
history, Nov. 12, 1942.

Guadalcanal is the largest island in the Solomon Islands, a
country located in the Pacific Ocean northeast of Australia
and east of Papua New Guinea.