Happy Juneteenth, A Very Important Day In Our History (opens in new tab)

Weeks after the Civil War's guns fell silent and barely two months after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas. They had come to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, an order freeing enslaved people in seceded Confederate states. And the date they arrived — June 19, 1865 — is The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued years earlier during the war, on Jan. 1, 1863. It's the version most commonly emphasized in history books: the executive order...