The Spanish-American War – Today In Southern History
24 April 1898
On this date in 1898…
Spain declared war on the United States, rejecting the American ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba after the sinking of the battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor.
Other Years:
1802 – The State of Georgia ceded its western lands to the United States, with the provision that the Federal Government obtain the title to Indian lands within Georgia as soon as “can be peaceably obtained on reasonable terms.” These lands would become Alabama and Mississippi.
1862 – Confederate gun boats battled the Federal fleet on the Mississippi River below New Orleans, Louisiana.
1863 – A skirmish was fought near Okolona, Mississippi as a defense against Grierson’s Raid.
1905 - Southern agrarian ‘fugitive,’ novelist, poet, and critic Robert Penn Warren, who became the first poet laureate of the United States was born in Guthrie, Kentucky.
1908 – A tornado tore a path of destruction from Amite, Louisiana to Purvis, Mississippi and killed more than 770 people.
1960 - A riot erupted in Biloxi, Mississippi, after Black protesters staging a “wade-in” at a whites-only beach.
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