It was August 14, 1941. Pearl Harbor was months in the future. But Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were already working together to foil the Nazis.
The pair were drafting what's now known as the Atlantic Charter, an agreement between the two world powers about how the world would look after the war was won. The two leaders issued their joint declaration on this day in 1941.
The leaders had met just a few days earlier aboard the U.S.S. Augusta, which was moored in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, writes the State Department's Office of the Historian. They reached consensus on eight shared principles, writes the office: “Both countries agreed not to seek territorial expansion; to seek the liberalization of international trade; to establish freedom of the seas, and international labor, economic, and welfare standards. Most importantly, both the United States and Great Britain were committed to supporting the restoration of self-governments for all countries that had been occupied during the war and allowing all peoples to choose their own form of government.”
