A thread follows one event or historical theme across the archive, wherever and whenever it appears. Pick a tab to read one; they are in the order they are filed on the timeline. Pulling a thread opens up a narrowed timeline view filtered to every year that thread touches.
The largest invasion by sea in human history, D-Day is the popularized name for Operation Neptune, or the Allied invasion of the German-occupied Normandy coast in June 1944. After months of planning, experience gained from previous invasions in Italy and in the Pacific, and extensive preparation efforts, the Allies were successfully able to secure a beachhead from which they were able to push out towards the rest of France, liberating Paris by August 1944 and greatly accelerating the end of the Second World War in Europe.
The first crewed spaceflight program of the United States. With the Soviet Union already ahead in the Space Race with the deployment of Sputnik 1 as the world's first artificial satellite, Project Mercury's goal was to successfully perform a crewed orbit of the Earth before the Soviets. However, this record would also go to the Soviets with the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961.
