Category Archives: History

1784 – Astronomer – mathematician Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, first to triangulate the heavens by observing the parallax of the star 61 Cygni, was born in Minden, Germany.

1898 – Poet – novelist Stephen Vincent Benét was born in Bethlehem, PA.

1933 – Aviator Wiley Post ended his first around-the-world flight.  Post traveled 15,596 miles in 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes aboard the Winnie Mae.

1933 – Caterina Jarboro became the first Black prima donna of an opera company, when she performed Aida with the Chicago Opera Company at the Hippodrome in New York City.

1934 – Gangster John Dillinger was gunned down and mortally wounded by FBI agents at the Biograph Theatre in Chicago, IL.

1975 – Confederate General Robert E. Lee had his U.S. citizenship restored by the U.S. Congress.

365 – A powerful earthquake off the coast of Greece generated a massive tsunami that slammed into Alexandria, Egypt, killing some 5,000 people.

1899 – Author Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls) was born in Oak Park, IL.

1920 – Violinist Isaac Stern was born in Kremenetz, Ukraine.

1925 – In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called “Monkey Trial” ended, as John Thomas Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in violation of state law.

1930 – The Veterans’ Administration of the United States was established.

1957 – Althea Gibson became the first Black woman to win a major U.S. tennis title, when she won the Women’s National clay-court singles competition.

1959 – A U.S. District Court judge in New York City ruled that Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence was not obscene.  The ruling was upheld in U.S. appeals court one year later.

1881 – Five years after leading a rebellion against Gen. George A. Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, Sioux leader Chief Sitting Bull surrendered to the U.S. Army.

1919 – Explorer Edmund Hillary, first to climb Mt. Everest, was born in Auckland, New Zealand.

1942 – The first members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACS) began training at Fort Des Moines, IA.  In 1943, the name was changed to WACS (Women’s Army Corps) and the organization became a part of the U.S. Army.

1948 – President Harry S. Truman instituted a military draft, requiring nearly 10 million men to register within 2 months.

1969 – Apollo 11 landed on the moon, 4 days after it departed from Earth.

1976 – Viking I, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, became the first spacecraft to land on Mars.

1985 – Treasure hunters began retrieving some $400 million in coins and silver ingots from the sea floor in the biggest underwater excavation in history.  The bounty came from the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which had sunk 40 miles off the coast of Key West, Florida in 1622.  It was located by treasure hunter Mel Fisher.  The 40 tons of gold and silver and was the richest treasure find since the opening of King Tut’s tomb in the 1930’s.

1834 – Artist Edgar Degas was born in Paris.

1865 – Surgeon Charles Mayo, founder of the Mayo Clinic & Mayo Foundation, was born in Rochester, MN.

1896 – Author A.J. (Archibald Joseph) Cronin (The Citadel, Keys of the Kingdom) was born in Cardross, Strathclyde, Scotland.

1898 – Novelist Emile Zola fled France after being convicted of libel against the French military.

1984 – Geraldine Ferraro was nominated by the Democratic Party to become the first woman from a major political party to run for the office of U.S. Vice President.

64 – According to legend, Rome’s Emperor Nero decided to target Christians by starting a series of fires.

The Torches of Nero, by Henryk Siemiradzki.

1811 – Author William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair, Pendennis) was born in Calcutta, India.

1913 – Actor – comedian Red Skelton (The Red Skelton Show) was born in Vincennes, Indiana.

1936 – The Spanish Civil War began as a revolt by right-wing Spanish military officials in Morocco spread to mainland Spain.

1940 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated for a third term in office at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago.

1976 – Nadia Comaneci, a 14-year-old Romanian girl, became the first gymnast to score a perfect ‘10’ in Olympic competition at the Summer Games in Montréal.  Nadia went on to collect seven perfect scores; winning three gold medals, a silver and a bronze.

1986 – Close-up videotape images of the Titanic wreckage were released to the public.

1862 – The U.S. government authorized national cemeteries to bury those who died in battle, other war veterans, U.S. Presidents and government leaders.

1867 – The Harvard School of Dental Medicine was established in Boston, MA, becoming the first dental school in America.

1889 – Author Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason) was born in Malden, MA.

1901 – Dr. Willis Carrier installed a commercial air conditioning system at a Brooklyn, NY printing plant.  The system was the first to provide man-made control over temperature, humidity, ventilation and air quality.  It was originally installed to help maintain quality at the printing plant and for the first two decades of the 20^th Century, Carrier’s invention was used primarily to cool machines, not people.

1955 – Disneyland opened the gates to “The Happiest Place on Earth” in Anaheim, California.

1981 – Two skywalks suspended from the ceiling over the atrium lobby at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, MO, collapsed, killing 114 people.  Five years later, two design engineers were convicted of gross negligence.

1996 – TWA (Trans World Airlines) flight 800, carrying 230 people, including four cockpit crew members and 14 flight attendants, exploded, falling into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island, New York.  The Boeing 747 had lifted off from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport at 8:19 p.m. bound for Paris, France.  After a 16-month probe, the FBI announced it had found no evidence of a criminal act or a missile; concluding the crash was caused by electrical arcing in the plane’s center fuel tank igniting fuel vapors.

1998 – After a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in West Sepik, Papua New Guinea, three tsunami waves reaching heights of 45 feet, struck; followed by two smaller waves.  The waves killed more than 2,000 people and left some 10,000 left homeless.

1486 – Artist Andrea del Sarto was born.

1723 – Artist Joshua Reynolds (The Age of Innocence, Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, The Infant Hercules, The Strawberry Girl, Garrick Between Comedy and Tragedy) was born in Devon, England.

1790 – The District of Columbia, or Washington, D.C., was established as the permanent seat of the United States Government.

1872 – Explorer Roald Amundsen (discovered South Pole: December 14, 1911; first man to sail from the Atlantic to Pacific through the Northwest Passage: 1903-1905) was born in Borge, Ǿstfold, Norway.

1926 – The first underwater color photographs appeared in National Geographic magazine.  The pictures were taken near the Florida Keys.

This is the first color photograph ever taken underwater. It’s a hogfish captured off the Florida Keys in 1926 by National Geographic photographer Charles Martin and Dr. William Longley.

1945 – Under the Manhattan Project, the U.S. military exploded Fat Boy, the experimental, plutonium bomb, at 5:29 A.M. in the first U.S. test of an atomic bomb.  The mushroom-shaped cloud rose to a height of 41,000 feet above the New Mexico desert at Alamogordo Air Base.  All life in a one-mile radius ceased to exist.

1951 – Author J.D. Salinger published his only novel, Catcher in the Rye.

1969 – Apollo 11, the first U.S. lunar landing mission, is launched from Cape Canaveral, FL.

1999 – John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, MA, killing him, his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette.  The three had been en route to a Kennedy family wedding.

1606 – Artist Rembrandt Van Rijn (The Night Watch, Man with a Magnifying Glass, The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp, Descent from the Cross, Rape of Ganymede) was born in Leiden, Holland.

1779 – Author – poet Clement Clarke Moore (’Twas the Night before Christmas) was born in New York City.

1867 – Maggie Lena Walker, first female founder of a bank (St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, VA) was born in Richmond, VA.

1903 – The newly formed Ford Motor Company took its first order from Chicago dentist Ernst Pfenning: an $850 2-cylinder Mode A.

1919 – Author Iris Murdoch (Under the Net, The Sea, the Sea) was born in Dublin.

1940 – The tallest man in the world, Robert Wadlow who stood 8”, 11.1/10” and weighed 439 pounds, died at the age of 22.

1965 – The Mariner IV spacecraft sent back the first close-up pictures of the planet Mars.

The first close-up image ever taken of Mars, this photo shows an area about 330 km across by 1200 km from limb to bottom of frame.

1968 – One Life to Live debuted on ABC-TV.

1968 – Commercial air travel began between the United States and the U.S.S.R. with the first plane, a Soviet Aeroflot jet, landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

1997 – Fashion designer Gianni Versace was shot to death on the steps of his mansion in Miami Beach, FL.  Police believe Andrew Phillip Cunanan shot Versace during a crime spree that included the shooting deaths of 4 other men.

1099 – Christian knights from Europe capture Jerusalem after seven weeks of a siege and begin massacring the city’s Jewish and Muslim residents, during what’s regarded as the First Crusade.

1789 – Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops storm and dismantle the Bastille, a royal fortress, thus launching the French Revolution.  This day is still celebrated as Bastille Day or Fete National in France.

1798 – The U.S. Congress passed the Sedition Act, changing the period of residency required before immigrants could apply for citizenship from 5 to 14 years.

1862 – Florence Bascom, the first female geologist appointed to the U.S. Geological Survey and the first to be elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, was born in Williamstown, MA.

1868 – Alvin J. Fellows of New Haven, CT, patented the tape measure.

1881 – New México Sheriff Pat Garrett shot outlaw Henry McCarty, a.k.a. “Billy the Kid,” to death at the Maxwell Ranch in New México.

1903 – Author Irving Stone (Lust for Life, Love is Eternal, The Agony and the Ecstasy) was born in San Francisco, CA.

1908 – The Adventures of Dolly opened at the Union Square Theatre in New York City.  It was the first film release for director D.W. Griffith.

1910 – Cartoonist William Hanna (half of Hanna-Barbera team; The Flintstones) was born in Melrose, NM.

1912 – Folk singer – songwriter Woody Guthrie (This Land is Your Land, Hard Travelin’, Union Maid, So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh, Dirty Overalls, Pretty Boy Floyd) was born in Okemah, OK.

1913 – Gerald R. Ford (Leslie King, Jr.: changed name to Gerald Ford after his adoptive father; 38^th U.S. President) was born in Omaha, NE.

1914 – Robert H. Goddard of Worcester, MA, patented liquid rocket fuel.

1918 – Movie director Ingmar Bergman (Through a Glass Darkly, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander) was born in Uppsala, Sweden.

1946 – Dr. Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care.

100 B.C. – Roman writer and emperor Gaius Julius Caesar was born.

1832 – U.S. Indian agent and explorer Henry Schoolcraft stumbled upon the source of the Mississippi River.  Its 2,552-mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico begins at Lake Itasca, MN.

1836 – John Ruggles of Thomaston, ME, received patent #1 from the U.S. Patent Office under a new patent-numbering system.  Before Ruggles, a U.S. Senator from Maine and the author of the 1836 Patent Act which brought back the examination process, there had been 9,957 non-numbered patents issued.  Ruggles received his patent for a traction wheel used in locomotive steam engines.

1938 – Spectators paid 25 cents to witness the first television theatre that opened in Boston, MA.  Some 200 people watched the variety show with dancing and singing lasted 45 minutes.  The acts were performed on a floor above the theatre and transmitted downstairs by TV.

1960 – At the Democratic National Party convention in Los Angeles, Sen. John F. Kennedy was nominated for the presidency, defeating fellow Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.

Kennedy

1985 – At Wembley Stadium in London, Prince Charles and Princess Diana officially opened Live AID, a worldwide rock concert designed by Irish singer Bob Geldof to raise money for famine- and drought-stricken Africa.  The concert continued at a number of venues around the world, linked by satellite to more than a billion viewers in 110 nations.