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 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. 

CIA reference photograph of a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile in Red Square, Moscow.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a 13-day confrontation between
the United States and the Soviet Union, when American
deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were
matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba.

The crisis lasted from October 16 to October 28, 1962. The
confrontation is widely considered the closest the
the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear
war.

Cuban Missile Crisis, map of immediate-threat areas.

ROSS SIMPSON

The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American part-talkie musical drama
film directed by Alan Crosland and produced by Warner Bros.
Pictures. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music and lip-synchronous singing
and speech (in several isolated sequences).

Its release heralded the commercial ascendance of sound
films and effectively marked the end of the silent film era
with the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system.
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Al Jolson (1886 – 1950) as Jack Robin on stage, in a
publicity shot representing the film’s final scene.

The Siege of Yorktown, Virginia, the decisive battle in
America’s shocking triumph over the mighty British
Empire in its War of Independence, began on this day
in history, Sept. 28, 1781.

The siege ended three weeks later, on Oct. 19, with the
surrender of the British garrison led by Lord Charles
Cornwallis. 

Painting depicts the surrender of the British at Yorktown.