Category Archives: History

1921 – Author Alex Haley (Roots, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Queen) was born in Ithaca, New York.

1965 – The Watts area of Los Angeles erupted into violence after a White police officer arrested a Black man for drunk driving.  The riots resulted in the deaths of 34 people and the arrests of more than 3,000 others, along with over $40 million in property damage.

1984 – During preparations for his weekly radio broadcast, U.S. President Ronald Reagan joked, “…I have signed legislation that will outlaw Russia. We begin bombing in five minutes.”  The remark was made during a time when technicians had the microphone open and the President didn’t think he was being heard.

1992 – The Mall of America opened in Bloomington, Minnesota.  It was the largest retail and entertainment complex in the United States.

1821 – Missouri became the 24^th state of the United States.

1846 – The U.S. Congress established the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.  James Smithson of England had made it possible with a gift of $500,000.

1869 – O.B. Brown of Malden, Massachusetts, patented the motion-picture projector.

1874 – Herbert Hoover, the 31^st U.S. President, was born in West Branch, Iowa.

1977 – David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker, was arrested and charged with being the notorious “Son of Sam” serial killer who had terrorized New York City for the preceding year.

1995 – Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were indicted on 11 counts each for bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995; a blast that killed 168 people.

1831 – The first steam locomotive train began its inaugural run, between Albany and Schenectady, New York.

1859 – Nathan Ames of Saugus, MA, patented the escalator.

1910 – Alva J. Fisher of Chicago, IL, received a patent for the electric washing machine.

1936 – Jesse Owens became the first American to win four medals in one Olympics.  Owens ran one leg of the winning 400-meter relay team in Berlin.  His 3 other gold medals were won in the 100-meter, 200-meter and the long jump events.

1945 – Three days after it dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, the U.S. dropped a plutonium bomb carried by the U.S.A. B-29 bomber, Bockscar, on Nagasaki.  Japan surrendered unconditionally the following day, thus ending World War II.

1969 – Cult leader Charles Manson and his disciples began their rampage of terror in Los Angeles by breaking into the home of movie director Roman Polanski and brutally murdering his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, movie director Voityck Frykowski, hair stylist Jay Sebring, student Steven Parent and coffee heiress Abigail Folger.  The next night the group murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

1974 – President Richard M. Nixon officially resigned from office.  Vice-President Gerald Ford was sworn in as the nation’s 38^th president, and Nelson Rockefeller was sworn in as Vice-President.  Ford had been the Senate minority leader in October 1973, when Nixon’s first Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, resigned.  Therefore, for the first time in American history, its people found themselves with a president and vice-president they didn’t elect.

1866 – North Pole explorer Matthew Henson was born in Baltimore, Maryland.

1876 – Thomas A. Edison patented the mimeograph machine, describing it as a method of preparing autographic stencils for printing.

1879 – Emiliano Zapata, a leader of peasants and indigenous peoples during the Mexican Revolution, was born in Anenecuilco, México.

1919 – Film producer Dino De Laurentiis (The Bible, Barbarella, Nights of Cambria, La Strada) was born in Torre Annunciata, Italy.

1963 – A gang of 15 thieves stole £2.6 million ($7 million) in Buckinghamshire, England, in Britain’s “Great Train Robbery.”  All but three of the gang were identified by fingerprints.

1974 – President Richard M. Nixon announced his resignation in the wake of the growing Watergate scandal, becoming the first U.S. president to resign from office.

1782 – General George Washington created the “Badge for Military Merit,” later named the Purple Heart.

1947 – Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl completed his 4,300-mile, 101-day journey from Peru to Raroia in the Tuamotu Archipelago, near Tahiti.

1959 – The unmanned U.S. satellite Explorer 6 took the first photograph of Earth from space.

1964 – The U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, prompting America’s expansion into Southeast Asia.

Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in a post-midnight press briefing at the Pentagon points out action in the Gulf of Tonkin, August 4, 1964.

1990 – President George H.W. Bush ordered the organization of Operation Desert Shield in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2.

1998 – The U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam,Tanzania were bombed, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans.  The attacks were linked to Al Qaeda.

1809 – Poet Alfred Tennyson (The Charge of the Light Brigade, In Memoriam, The Lady of Shalott, The Lotuseaters, The Idylls of the King, Maud, Enoch Arden, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After) was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England.

1881 – Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, was born in Lochfield, Scotland.

1911 – Actress – comedian Lucille Ball was born in Jamestown, New York.

1928 – Artist Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

1930 – Judge Joseph Crater, a 41-year-old New York Supreme Court Justice, disappeared after leaving a New York City restaurant and was never seen or heard from again.  It remains New York City’s longest-running unsolved missing-persons case.

1945 – More than 200,000 civilians died from the explosion and/or radiation after an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, Japan.  It was the first time an atomic bomb had been dropped over a populated place and the first time a nuclear weapon had been used in warfare.

1996 – NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin announced the possibility that a primitive form of microscopic life may have existed on Mars more than three billion years ago.  The evidence came from a fossil found on a meteorite in Antarctica believed to have come from Mars billions of years ago.

Microscopic analyses revealed chain structures in meteorite fragment ALH84001.

1850 – Author Guy de Maupassant (The Tellier House, Yvette, Toine, The Horla, The Diamond Necklace, The Umbrella, The Piece of String, A Woman’s Life, Bel-Ami, Peter and John) was born in Dieppe, France.

1858 – The first telegraph line was successfully laid across the Atlantic Ocean.

1884 – The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty was laid at Bedloe’s Island (now called Liberty Island), New York.  The actual statue was accepted as a gift to the United States from the people of France by U.S. President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886.

1914 – Euclid Avenue and East 105^th Street in Cleveland, Ohio became the first intersection in the U.S. to be equipped with an electric traffic light.

1962 – Actress Marilyn Monroe was found dead from a drug overdose in Los Angeles at the age of 36.

1981 – President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 air traffic controllers who had gone on strike over pay and work conditions.  The mass terminations slowed air travel significantly.

1792 – Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Prometheus Unbound, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas, Hellas, Adonais, A Defence of Poetry, Ode to the West Wind) was born in Sussex, England.

1821 – The Saturday Evening Post was published as a weekly for the first time.

1927 – Radio station 2XAG, later named WGY, the General Electric station in Schenectady, NY, began experimental operations from a 100,000-watt transmitter.

1964 – The bodies of 3 missing civil rights workers were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.  Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney had been missing since June 21.

1492 – Christopher Columbus set sail aboard the Santa Maria, accompanied by a crew of 90 and two more ships, the Nina and the Pinta.

1949 – The rival Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League merged to form the National Basketball Association (NBA).

1958 – The Nautilus, a U.S. nuclear submarine, accomplished the first undersea voyage to the geographic North Pole.

1769 – Gaspar de Portola, a Spanish army captain, and Juan Crespi, a Franciscan priest, stopped in what is now Los Angeles on their way north from San Diego.  They liked the area and named it Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, or “Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula.”  Porciuncula was a chapel in Italy.

Gaspar de Portola

1871 – Artist John Sloan (South Beach Bathers; cofounder of Ashcan Art) was born in Lock Haven, PA.

1923 – President Warren G. Harding died of a stroke in San Francisco, CA, after returning from a trip to the Alaska territory.  Vice-President Calvin Coolidge became the nation’s 30^th President.  Harding’s death came just as the “Teapot Dome” scandal broke.

1934 – Upon the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Adolf Hitler became the nation’s absolute leader.

1985 – Delta Flight 191 crashed as it approached Dallas / Fort Worth International Airport, killing 135 people and injuring 15.  A newly-identified weather phenomenon known as wind shear was blamed for the disaster.

1990 – Iraqi military forces invaded Kuwait.

1992 – At the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, Jackie Joyner-Kersee became the first woman to win 2 consecutive Olympic gold medals in the heptathlon.