July 6, 1936, Route 66, New Mexico. This is Martha Evans, 32. She had been walking for three days. Her husband died of tuberculosis in Oklahoma in May. The farm was foreclosed. She took the six kids and a Radio Flyer wagon and started west for California. The twins in the wagon were 11 months old. The boys walking were 6, 5, 4, and 3. Her dress was torn on barbed wire. Her leg was cut and infected. She wrapped it with a feed sack. She had $1.60 in her pocket. A photographer from the Resettlement Administration saw them and pulled over. He offered her a ride. She said no. She said if she took a ride now, the kids would expect one every time they were tired. She gave him her name and kept walking. The photo ran in newspapers across the country. Donations came to a PO box in Barstow. She got $200 and a bus ticket. She made it to Bakersfield and picked grapes. All six kids lived. Three went to college. Martha died in 1978. The wagon is in the Smithsonian.

On June 13, 1777, a 19-year-old French teenager landed on a beach in South Carolina, uninvited, to fight in someone else's war. He would become one of the most important men in American history. The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the richest young aristocrats in France. He had a beautiful wife, a fortune, and zero reason to risk any of it. But he believed in the American cause so fiercely that when the French king forbade him from going, Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed anyway. He literally went AWOL from a life of luxury to bleed for a country that didn't exist yet. Congress was annoyed at first. Another foreign officer looking for a paycheck? Then Lafayette offered to serve for free and pay his own way. That got their attention. He met Washington and the two formed one of the great father-son bonds in American history. Washington had no biological children. Lafayette named his only son George Washington Lafayette. He took a bullet in the leg at Brandywine and kept rallying the retreat. He was instrumental at Yorktown, the battle that won the war. He went home a hero on two continents. A foreign teenager believed in America before America did. 249 years ago today.

OTD in 1864: 100,000 men vanished overnight, and the greatest general of the age had no idea where they went. This might be the most underrated move of the Civil War. Context: Grant had just spent ten days locked in trench warfare at Cold Harbor, Virginia, after a frontal assault on June 3 that cost him thousands of men in under an hour. He admitted it was the worst mistake of his career. The armies were so close that soldiers could not lift their heads above the dirt in daylight. Everyone, including Lee, expected Grant to do what every Union commander before him did after a bloody repulse: retreat north and regroup. Instead, on the night of June 12, Grant did something audacious. He pulled the entire Army of the Potomac out of trenches that were in some places only yards from Confederate lines. No bugles, no fires, wheels muffled. By morning the Union trenches were empty and Lee's scouts found nothing but abandoned earthworks. The army marched south, away from Richmond, which made no sense to Confederate observers. Then Union engineers did something almost nobody thought possible: they threw a pontoon bridge across the James River, roughly 2,100 feet of it, over water up to 85 feet deep with a four-foot tidal swing. They built it in about eight hours. It was one of the longest floating bridges in military history. For three full days Lee was effectively blind, unsure whether Grant was north or south of the James. By the time the picture cleared, Grant's army was across the river attacking Petersburg, the rail hub that fed Richmond. The siege that followed lasted nine months and ended with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Everyone remembers Cold Harbor as Grant's worst day. Almost nobody remembers that one week later he pulled off the maneuver that won the war.

July 9th, 1755. The British Army got slaughtered in the woods of Pennsylvania. Of 1,300 men, nearly 1,000 were killed or wounded in four hours. Every mounted officer was shot. Except one. A 23-year-old colonel named George Washington had two horses shot out from under him. Four musket balls passed through his coat. He rallied the survivors. Organized the retreat. Buried the dying general. And walked off the field without a scratch. 15 years later, an old Indian chief found him in the Ohio Valley. Said he had personally fired 11 shots at Washington that day. Missed every one. "He cannot die in battle," the chief said. "He will become the chief of nations." Twenty-one years after that prophecy, Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States.

Ilhan Omar gives a history lesson: “The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked it was used during World War ELEVEN.”

The U.S. has always accepted more political violence than similar democracies, with threats rapidly growing. But we cannot stop at condemning political violence alone. Too often, there is one thing at the root of these horrific acts: our nation's easy access to firearms.