The event has been preserved since shortly after its conclusion via audio recordings and a documentary film. The two original LP sets, Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More and Woodstock 2, were recorded under technically difficult circumstances but were eagerly anticipated when first released. Since then they have been re-mastered and made available in every listening form imaginable. Archived unreleased songs from the event continue to appear.

The Oscar®-winning film Woodstock, still occasionally shown in its original wide screen format in theaters, is widely available in various home video packages: the latest being Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music The Director’s Cut 40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition with bonus features such as added scenes and interviews. An increasing number of books, photo essays, websites, memorabilia, and a museum on the site – even a new Ang Lee film – give the Woodstock phenomenon a sight, sound and tactile presence. The opportunity exists for current and future generations to get an idea of the experience without having been there.

But what about the feel and meaning of Woodstock? The promotional bonanza has not escaped the attention of two key participants personally interviewed for this GreatHistory.com series. They recognize some of these keepsakes as an opportunity to expand the reach of Woodstock’s music and message. But the lasting cultural implications of three days of peace and music are omnipresent and include the impact on how popular music is presented live and on film or video.

Before Wadleigh, Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker and others began the mammoth task of editing hundreds of thousand of feet of film into a big screen presentation, Wadleigh set the tone for how the music and the event would be treated on film:

I really gravitate to not only good musical performances, and good music, but to the message that’s coming through the words. One of the things that made the camera work so effective to me is that I lectured to myself and the other twelve or fourteen cameramen, “Don’t make it a move or zoom to celebrate the technique of the effect. Listen to the sound, listen to the lyrics, really involve yourself in the content and the performance and let your selective lens, zoom, move and so on serve what the music and the artist and lyrics are saying.” So when Jimmy Hendrix played the U. S. National Anthem not with a single vocal word but with sound effects in his guitar, that sonic screaming and anguish counts as well. It was a lyrical expression of language, a sonic one.

Wadleigh differentiates between the performances that were captured on film at Woodstock and the highly produced concert and music video performances of today:

You have someone like Joe Cocker on stage, that’s an example of a great performance by somebody who has no backdrop, no make-up, no hair style, no nothing. Today with all of their hairdos and with all of their choreography, all of the carefully lit stuff, is that what a performance is all about? I don’t think so, I think it’s really a raw entertainer or communicator to the world, getting up there and doing their thing.

Managing the stage, performers and audience announcements still allowed Chip Monck time to appreciate the ground-breaking performances of the festival. Noting the periodic celebrations of Woodstock, he looks ahead to the fiftieth and wonders how the original could ever be outdone. “It may very well be because of my age and because of my musical tastes, I don’t hear anything anymore that’s as good as we had there. Is it an act that’s going to make you tremble? Those did.”

Immediately following Woodstock many other events attempted to duplicate the non-stop music and festival atmosphere. Over the decades large musical gatherings have lessened. They have become more sophisticated and must compete with multimedia concert experiences, but they are still relevant. The Coachella Valley Music Festival is one. Wadleigh talks about another.

There’s this famous festival (in the U. K.) called the Glastonbury Festival that started one year after Woodstock and that’s a direct result of Woodstock. I went this year because they were doing homage to Woodstock and it’s a fantastic festival. Who was the star act Friday night? Neil Young. And how old was the group watching him? Young. That was a performance right out of Woodstock. The next night, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Then a guy who’s pushing sixty, Bruce Springsteen. He went on for 2½ hours, with no break in between. I think what the audiences get is these people are the real thing, playing music for themselves, and not writing it to have hits. I think that’s contemporary proof that this is successful stuff.

And the social implications of Woodstock? Perhaps the long-standing “generation gap” closed just a little because of the non-confrontational theme of Woodstock. “One interesting vignette,” says Monck “was about one of the Monticello police officers. An older man who’d been on the force for about 35 years, he said that he didn’t really agree with their dress, or with their length of hair and the way they looked, but that he had never in all of his years on the force met a more courteous and flexible group of young people. And he said, ‘It was a delight to take off my gun belt and my hat and put on a T-shirt and help cook hot dogs.’”

Wadleigh sees the social awareness raised by the counter-culture forces of the Woodstock era still relevant today as the world struggles with environmental and economic concerns, for which he is now actively working toward awareness and solutions:

Today’s problems really tie back to the major questioning of the 1960s and I would point out to you that a Nobel laureate, a great guy named (Dr.) Steven Chu, who (President) Barack Obama had the great intelligence to appoint as head of the Energy Department, has been giving very “Woodstockian” interviews. You will hear the words come out of his mouth that could have come out of the mouths of the counterculture of the 1960s. Steven Chu is right there with the same ideas.

Indeed, the legacy continues to grow.

We get it. Rhode Island is small, at just over 1,200 square miles.

Small but mighty. Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams, who, in 1636, got kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for not having the right religious views. Williams bought the land from the Narragansett Indians and voila! Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was born. Soon after, Anne Hutchinson settled on one of the islands with her band of merry heretics. Rhode Island became the land of religious tolerance in colonial America.

Hence the nickname Rogue’s Island. Like Australia, Rhode Island has some checkers in its past, and its orneriness is deep-seated in history.

Take Independence Day, for example. On July 4, many of us will have a barbeque or travel or picnic and say “Hallelujah!” for the day off. Few of us will remember that the Declaration of Independence was ratified that day and that the original thirteen colonies gave King George III the proverbial middle finger in their quest for “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But Rhode Island couldn’t wait until summer. Oh no. On May 4, 1776, the Rhode Island General Assembly declared its independence from Great Britain and gave up its allegiance to that tyrant King George III. George was apparently going beyond the “taxation without representation” problem and burning ships and confiscating property and putting the Rhode Island colonists in danger. So the Rhode Island General Assembly repealed the act whereby the good people of Rhode Island gave up certain freedoms in order to be protected by the King. A social contract, if you will, that fell right in line with the spirit of the Enlightenment and with folks like Rousseau, Paine, and later, Jefferson.

Since the King and his Court weren’t holding up their end of the social contract of protecting its people, the neo-natives of the American colonies were getting restless, and they started printing pamphlets and fomenting rebellion.

But Rhode Islanders are impatient. We hate lines, we hate waiting, and we love donuts. Hence the Dunkin Donuts in our fair state are spaced just less than a mile apart so there’s no waiting and wasting of time. Same goes for revolutions. Rhode Islanders had read Paine’s Common Sense and were itchin’ for freedom. So two months before ratification of the big Declaration of Independence, they repealed the act that said Rhode Island colonists were British subjects. It was the first official move toward independence for the colonies. Rhode Island had just moved to the front of the line.

Rhode Islanders are also a very thorough breed and have the time to be so meticulous because we won’t travel more than 20 minutes to do anything. Anything over 20 minutes is considered a road trip. With all this extra time, the General Assembly of 1776 ensured it covered its logistical bases, further stating that any and all mentions of the king on all documents and correspondence would herewith carry the nomenclature of “the Governor and Company of the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”

It takes a band of colonies to declare independence and make it stick. But it only takes one to make it official. Thank you, Rogue Rhode Islanders of 1776, for hurrying to the head of the line.

Though I was born six years after this epic event, its telling and retelling never grew old for kids in my neighborhood. It seemed like the dust and smoke of battle were still clearing when we were kids, and the Marshall Plan was still rebuilding Europe. It was our fathers and uncles who stormed those beaches and jumped from those planes, and when they were ready to talk about it years later, when the horror had faded sufficiently to let them hazard a look back, the stories they told around the family dinner table became our shared history. Hollywood stepped up and did its part to underscore that ownership by association. Aside from Playboy magazine, nothing was more enthralling to boys my age than seeing John Wayne wading ashore at Omaha beach through the storm of lead, defying death and the forces of evil with righteous determination and unworldly calm. And the best place to see it was at the drive-in.

Good or bad, like it or not, the world was a different place back then. At the beginning of the war, the average guy living in the average American community knew a world captured in Norman Rockwell paintings. Daily life was simpler, more decent, less expensive, and a lot slower than it is now, and for none of us was that truer in 1941 than for tens of thousands of Native American men and women who enlisted in the armed forces after Pearl Harbor. Either then or now, few Americans could imagine the journey Donald Goodbird made from his home village of Independence, on the upper Missouri River, to the beaches of Normandy.

Goodbird was in his early 20s at the start of the war, and like most members of the Three Affiliated Tribes in central North Dakota (the same folks who took care of Lewis and Clark during the winter of 1804-05), Goodbird came from a clan of successful ranchers. Over the next three years, about 300 of his fellow tribal members, out of a total population of 2000, enlisted in the armed forces. When the day came to go off to war, Goodbird saddled up his favorite horse, said goodbye to all his clan relations in their native Hidatsa, and rode off down the river and over the hills toward the town of Elbowoods, the agency headquarters. Once there, he left his horse at Martin Cross’ place and caught a ride on the mail truck to Garrison. From Garrison, Goodbird rode a bus to the enlistment center in Fargo, 200 miles further east, and vanished into the war. Then late one afternoon in September of 1945, the same Donald Goodbird hopped off the back of the mail truck at the post office in Elbowoods, shouldered his duffle bag, and set off up the dirt road toward Martin Cross’s house where he’d left his horse. After a home cooked meal in Dorothy Cross’s kitchen, Goodbird saddled his horse and rode off up the river toward Independence, retracing the tracks he’d made four years before.

“That’s the way a lot of our guys came home,” remembers Crusoe Cross, who was a boy of 15 at war’s end. “They came walking in over the hills, or down Old State Road Number Eight, with a duffel bags on their shoulder and pockets full of cash. No parades, no fanfare, but they were our heroes. For the first time in our history, most of our people were now fluent in English. That war gave us first hand knowledge of the outside world, and for the first time in our history we had folding money in our pockets. It changed everything.”

And then again, it changed nothing. In a speech he delivered as president, Dwight Eisenhower praised the American Indians for their service in combat. Of the tens of thousands of Indians who served under his command in Europe, not one had ever been discharged dishonorably. Not one Native American ever turned tail and ran away from a fight.

So guys like Donald Goodbird were even more confused when they came back home to discover that surveyors for the Army Corps of Engineers were marking out the hills above their towns – hills that had been theirs since time immemorial, overlooking rich and fertile river bottoms that had been protected by treaty for over a hundred years – for a massive dam that would be built as the centerpiece of the Pick/Sloan Plan. When the five primary Pick/Sloan dams were completed in the 1960s, twenty-three tribes of Indians had lost their treaty protected homelands lands to massive dams, and not one white town had been inundated. The Indians had gone off to distant continents to fight a war to protect their homeland. When they came home they would spend another twenty fighting to keep it. And they would lose.

For many Indians who stormed ashore with our father’s and uncles on the beaches at Normandy, so much had changed in their leaving, and so much had stayed the same in their coming home. What they saved for the people of Europe they would loose at home. In towns like Lodgegrass, Whiteshield, and Windowrock, in that other America most of us will never know, that’s the story you hear about D-Day.

Paul VanDevelder is the author of Savages and Scoundrels: The untold story of America’s road to empire through Indian territory (Yale University Press, 2009)

Miss Collins: “Who said ‘Give me liberty or give me death’?”

Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!

Eager 5th grader: “Patrick Henry!”

Miss Collins: “Very good. Five points.”

Eager 5th graders: “Yay!”

The eager 5th graders did not know the context of the speech, or where it took place, or even who Patrick Henry was. But he did say those five words, and that’s apparently enough depth for a 5th grader.

(For those interested, Patrick Henry was an attorney and a revolutionary leader who advocated for war against the British at the second Virginia Convention in 1775. His famous speech, which ended in the extra-credit winning question above, was delivered without the use of the colonial version of the teleprompter – that is, notes.)

Back to the game.

Miss Collins: “Who sewed the first American flag?”

Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!

Eager 5th grader: “Betsy Ross.”

Miss Collins: “Excellent! Another five points.”

Now Miss Collins was a very good teacher. When she gave students grades that were nothing to write home about, she looked them in the eye and said, “D is for darling.” And for those of us who finished our work early, we had a full classroom library to keep us busy. That Miss Collins, she was good.

But I’m not sure our team earned those five points for that last answer. Like so many historical facts, this one is brought under suspicion only because the best evidence we have that Betsy Ross sewed the first flag is from Betsy Ross herself. On her deathbed she told her grandson William Canby, “Yup, that was me.” Specious evidence there.

We do know that Mrs. Ross was a seamstress and did sew the most famous flag, with the thirteen stars (one for each original colony, thank you Miss Collins) arranged in a circle. But we can’t be sure that she even met George Washington, never mind presented him with the finished product.

The first flag was probably designed by New Jerseyan Francis Hopkinson, Chairman of the Continental Navy Board’s Middle Department. His flag, found here, has the stars arranged in an alternating horizontal pattern – three stars, then two stars.

So why is all this flag business important? Because history is more than the dates and sayings you memorized in school. And with Flag Day just around the corner (June 14), it would behoove us to accurately revisit that symbol of freedom that is so important to Americans.

Why? Because the flag means more than the droning out of the Pledge of Allegiance by uneager 5th graders. And while the Betsy Ross story is easy to remember, it’s inaccurate. So go ahead, be smarter than a 5th grader when you celebrate Flag Day this Sunday.

Tracey McCormick is Managing Editor at GreatHistory.com.

I’d meant to take another look at combat artists, and this seems like a good opportunity to consider some of the men who shouldered a rifle and a sketch pad when they crossed the channel. I figured it wouldn’t be hard. World War II was thoroughly recorded by film, camera and pencil.  My plan was to portray the American, British, Canadian and German view of the event through eyewitness combat art.

I believe the British and Canadians had sketch artists present as references seemed to indicate that, but I couldn’t find the actual art. As for the Germans, they were highly censored. In 1933, during the Bau Haus movement, all German artists were forced to join the Reich’s Chamber of Culture. It’s a safe bet that the German Army didn’t put sketch artists in the trenches of the Normandy coast.

The Reichs Chamber of Culture would probably not have approved of the work of the US Army’s Howard Brodie. He sketched such scenes as the bound and slumped body of an executed German spy and a GI answering natures call. Brodie, featured in PBS’s They Drew Fire, went on to become a courtroom artist and also covered the wars in Korean and Vietnam. His hurried line technique conveys the sense of urgency with which they were drawn.

The US Navy has an on line exhibit of three of their sketch artists, Mitchell Jamieson, Alexander Russo, and Dwight Shepler. Their works take you from pre-invasion right through to a couple of weeks afterward. Jamieson’s drawings in particular have an air of authenticity about them. You can smell the salt air and cordite, feel the thump of artillery in your chest, and hear the whistle of a close call.

They say that the pen is mightier than the sword. Is the pencil more powerful than the camera? You decide.

If anyone has a lead on other allied or axis combat artists, please share it with me. I’d love to do a follow up article.

Peter Culos is and artist/graphic designer as well as creator of history-geek.com

In Minnesota, she and her group of secretary friends would watch literal busloads of servicemen being shipped out. The young girls were inspired by their patriotism but lamented the shrinking dating pool. The patriotic, dateless young Helen, who had lost a childhood friend in the bombing at Pearl Harbor, signed up for the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in January of 1943.

She became a recruiter for the WAC, enlisting women in Kansas and Missouri for the clerical jobs left empty by the men who were being transferred to combat positions. In a being-in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time scenario, she was given the chance to work for General Eisenhower in London. Helen and 29 other young women, and thousands of men, boarded the Queen Mary and sailed across the Atlantic.

In London, she took dictation from five generals, faithfully transcribing and typing up the battle plans for the D-Day invasion. From February to April 1944, she typed eight hours a day, five days a week. The carbon paper she typed on and the typewriter ribbon she typed with were destroyed at the end of every workday.

Helen was instructed not to talk to anyone about what she was doing, and she would keep that promise for the next 50 years. Her daily, top-secret duties involved typing up battle orders that included troop movements, countries involved, supply routes, costs, and number of planes that would be involved in Operation Overlord.

The finished product was a four-inch book with the complete battle plans for D-Day. She met General Eisenhower after its completion, who informed her that she and her brother Jerry (who was also in England) both had three days passes. The General also informed her that her brother, as part of an armory division, would not be in the first wave of invasion. The young woman was surprised and touched by the General’s interest in her personal life.

With her duties complete, the young typist was free to sightsee around London. At Windsor Castle she ran into the King and Queen, and at 10 Downing Street she saw Winston Churchill. The humble farm girl from South Dakota was hobnobbing with the military and political leaders of the Allied forces.

After resettling back in the States, Mrs. Denton became a Red Cross Volunteer and Post Commander at the VFW 3650 in Riverdale, Georgia. In 2005 the Georgia House of Representatives recognized her military service, volunteer efforts, and outstanding citizenship with H.R. 593.

Mrs. Denton, now 88, continues to share her story with fellow veterans and schoolchildren. The full interview of Mrs. Helen Denton can be viewed online through the Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Oral History Project.

Bloggers were on the attack after President Barack Obama’s recent diplomatic tour of Europe, charging him with wrongly apologizing for American arrogance. One typically cited the cemeteries throughout the continent where tens of thousands of soldiers who never made it back from the world wars still rest. “The Europeans need to pray our arrogant attitude continues,” the message concluded-thus itself continuing the arrogance.

As we head into the 65th anniversary of D-Day, those critics should be reminded of how American military leaders handled diplomacy in 1944. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as commander in chief of Allied forces in Western Europe, had to work with larger-than-life superiors like President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as well as subordinates like generals Bernard Montgomery, Charles de Gaulle and George S. Patton Jr. Although some present-day fantasists claim the United States would have won the war sooner with Patton in overall command of the Western Allies, Patton would have been the first to disagree. Preferring combat to diplomacy, he suggested as early as 1919 that his friend Ike could take charge of overall army affairs in a future war, while he would gladly do what he did best-tactical execution in the field.

Eisenhower had the right combination of humility and ruthlessness to juggle all those egos and channel them into a coalition that won the war. As for residual good will, even after de Gaulle broke with the United States and NATO, his amity toward Ike remained lifelong.

Might that sort of good will count for anything in the United States’ future dealings in a hostile world? If Obama wants to re-forge coalitions, he might find Eisenhower a role model worth emulating.