Category Archives: History

1817 – Writer – philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, MA.

1854 – George Eastman, inventor of the Kodak camera and flexible roll film, was born in Waterville, NY.

1861 – The Confederate States of America signed a treaty with the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, giving them several Indian allies during the Civil War.

1862 – The U.S. Congress authorized the Medal of Honor.

1864 – Botanist George Washington Carver was born in Diamond Grove, MO.

1895 – Lyricist – songwriter Oscar Hammerstein II was born in New York City.

1908 – Actor – comedian Milton Berle (The Milton Berle Show, Texaco Star Theatre; actor: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Oscar, Side by Side) was born in New York City.

1917 – Artist Andrew Wyeth (the Helga pictures, Christina’s World, Young Swede, Adrift, Wind from the Sea, Knapsack) was born in Chadds Ford, PA.

1960 – The first Etch-A-Sketch went on sale.

1982 – E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial broke all box-office records by surpassing the $100-million mark of ticket sales in the first 31 days of its opening.

1984 – Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale announced that he’d chosen Rep. Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, making her the first woman to run on a major party ticket.

1767 – John Quincy Adams, 6^th U.S. President, was born in Braintree (now Quincy), MA.

1804 – Vice-President Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton to death in a duel over a long-standing personal and political argument.

1899 – Author E.B. White (Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, Is Sex Necessary?, The Elements of Style) was born in Mount Vernon, NY.

1914 – Babe Ruth debuted in the major leagues with the Boston Red Sox.

1920 – Actor Yul Brynner (Taidje Khan; The King and I, The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, Anastasia, The Brothers Karamazov, Futureworld, Westworld) was born in Vladivostok, Russia.

1934 – President Franklin Roosevelt appointed the first commissioners to the newly created Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

1979 – Parts of Skylab, America’s first space station, crashed into Australia and the Indian Ocean, five years after its last mission ended.

1890 – Wyoming entered the Union as the 44^th state.

1900 – One of the most famous trademarks in the world, ‘His Master’s Voice,’ was registered with the U.S. Patent Office.  The logo of the Victor Talking Machine Company, and later, RCA Victor, shows the dog, Nipper, looking into the horn of a gramophone machine.

1913 – The highest temperature ever recorded in the continental United States was 134 degrees in Death Valley, CA.

1925 – In Dayton, TN, the “Monkey Trial” began with John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee state law.

1929 – The U.S. government began issuing paper money in the small size we currently carry.

1949 – The first practical rectangular television picture tube came onto the market.

1962 – The Telstar communications satellite was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, FL, ushering in a new age of communication via telephone and TV.

1985 – The Coca-Cola Company announced that the former (regular) Coke was coming back to share shelf space with the New Coke, after a consumer furor.  The original formula was renamed Coca-Cola Classic.

1991 – After 1,000 years, the Russian people finally elected a president.  Boris Yeltsin took the oath of office this day, after he had resoundingly defeated the Communist Party candidate.

1764 – Author Ann Radcliffe (The Italian, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Romance of the Forest) was born in London.

1850 – After taking office 16 months earlier, President Zachary Taylor died following a brief and sudden illness.  His Vice-President, Millard Fillmore, was sworn in the next day.  The cause of Taylor’s death has been disputed by historians, but it most likely was cholera.

1901 – Author Barbara Cartland (Jigsaw, Etiquette Handbook, The Herb for Happiness, Lights, Laughter and a Lady, The Passionate Pilgrim) was born in Birmingham, England.

1922 – Johnny Weissmuller became the first to swim the 100-meters freestyle in less than a minute at an event in Alameda, CA.

1947 – In a ceremony at the Pentagon, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Florence Blanchfield to be a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, making her the first woman in U.S. history to hold permanent military rank.

1953 – New York Airways began the first commuter passenger service by helicopter in New York City.

1968 – The San Francisco Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers played the first indoor All-Star baseball game at the Astrodome in Houston, TX.

1993 – British forensic scientists announced that they had positively identified the remains of Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and three of their daughters.  The scientists used mitochondrial DNA to identify the bones, which had been excavated from a mass grave near Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 1991.

1795 – Martin Academy in Washington, TN changed its name to Washington College, the first college to be named after President George Washington.

1907 – Florenz Ziegfeld staged the first Ziegfeld Follies at the roof garden of the New York Theatre.

1908 – Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York (1958 – 1973), Vice-President under Gerald Ford (1974 – 1977), was born in Bar Harbor, ME.

1958 – The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) awarded the first gold record album to the soundtrack LP, Oklahoma!  The honor signifies that the album has reached one million dollars in sales.  The first gold single issued by the RIAA was Catch a Falling Star, by Perry Como, in March of 1958.

1754 – King’s College opened in New York City.  It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and, later, became Columbia University.

1860 – Composer Gustav Mahler was born in Vienna, Austria.

1865 – Mary Surratt became the first woman executed by the federal government for her role as a conspirator in President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

1887 – Artist Marc Chagall (Red Nude Sitting Up, I and the Village, Bride with a Fan, The Cattle Dealer, Jew at Prayer, Bella with a White Collar) was born in Liozna, Belarus, Russia.

1898 – The United States annexed the Hawaiian Islands.

Inauguration of Sanford Dole, the first governor of Hawaii, with him transferring the Sovereignty of Hawaii to United State Minister Harold M. Seewall.

1899 – Movie director George Cukor (My Fair Lady, A Star is Born, Born Yesterday, Love Among the Ruins, The Philadelphia Story) was born in New York City.

1902 – Movie director Vittorio de Sica (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Marriage Italian Style, Two Women, The Bicycle Thief; actor: The Shoes of the Fisherman, It Started in Naples) was born in Sora, Lazio, Italy.  (Some sources list his birth year as 1901.)

1976 – The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY, admitted women for the first time.

1981 – Sandra Day O’Connor, an Arizona court of appeals judge, became the first woman nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.  The Senate unanimously approved her appointment on September 21.

1858 – Lyman Blake of Abington, MA, patented the shoe manufacturing machine.

1885 – Louis Pasteur, famous for discovering the pasteurization process, made history by accomplishing the first effective antirabies inoculation (on a boy bitten by an infected dog).

1905 – John Walker’s fingerprints were the first to be exchanged by police officials in Europe and the U.S.  Law enforcement units in London and St. Louis, MO, completed the process.

1928 – The New York Strand Theatre presented The Lights of New York, the first all talking motion picture.  The film’s transitions used 24 titles to explain them.  The film told a gangster tale and introduced the phrase, “Take him for a ride.”

1942 –Anne Frank, a 13-year-old Jewish girl, and her family took refuge in a secret sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse in Nazi-occupied Holland.

1944 – In Hartford, CT, a fire broke out under the big top of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, killing 167 people and injuring 682 others.  The cause of the fire remained unknown until 1950, when a man named Robert D. Segee of Circleville, OH, confessed to starting it.  He was sentenced to 2 consecutive terms of 22 years in prison, the maximum penalty in Ohio at the time.

1948 – Frieda Hennock became the first woman to serve as commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, when President Harry S. Truman appointed her.

1957 – Althea Gibson became the first black tennis star to win the Wimbledon women’s singles tennis title.

1976 – In Annapolis, MD, the United States Naval Academy admitted women for the first time.

1810 – P.T. (Phineus Taylor) Barnum, co-founder of Barnum & Bailey Circus, was born in Bethel, CT.

1853 – Cecil John Rhodes, diamond tycoon and founder of the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, was born in Bishop’s Stortford, England.  The African country of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was named after him.

1865 – William Booth founded the Salvation Army in London, England.

1865 – The United States Secret Service was created.  At first, the agency was only responsible for protecting against the counterfeiting of U.S. currency.  In 1901, following the assassination of President William McKinley, the Secret Service began protecting the President of the U.S.

1946 – French fashion designer Louis Réard unveiled the first two-piece women’s swimsuit at a press party.  Réard called his creation a bikini.

1947 – Larry Doby became the first Black baseball player in the American League when he joined the Cleveland Indians.

1950 – Nineteen-year-old Army Private Kenneth Shadrick became the first American casualty in the Korean War.

1951 – Dr. William Shockley announced that he had invented a working and efficient junction transistor at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ.

1969 – Rod Laver became the first man to win four Wimbledon tennis titles.

1975 – Arthur Ashe defeated Jimmy Connors to become the first Black man to win Wimbledon.

1991 – Regulators in seven countries, including the U.S., shut down BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International).  The institution and four of its units were indicted for fraud, theft and money laundering from corrupt activities.  In July 1990, 5 former officials of BCCI had been convicted in Tampa, FL, for laundering $32 million in cocaine profits for Colombia’s Medellín drug cartel.

1996 – Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced they had successfully cloned a mammal from an adult cell, a sheep named Dolly.

1776 – In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, which declared the young nation’s complete independence from Great Britain.

1826 – Former Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within 5 hours of each other.

Jefferson

Adams

1855 – The first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was published in Brooklyn, NY.

1872 – Calvin Coolidge, 30^th President of the United States, was born in Plymouth Notch, VT.

1881 – The Tuskegee Institute opened in Tuskegee, AL, the site for Booker T. Washington’s institution for academic and vocational training.

1888 – The first rodeo in America was held in Prescott, AZ.

1895 – America the Beautiful, the famous song often touted as the true U.S. national anthem was published as a poem written by Katharine Lee Bates, a Wellesley College professor, in the Congregationalist, a church newspaper.

1939 – Lou Gehrig announced his retirement from baseball in a ceremony at Yankee Stadium in New York City.

1970 – Casey Kasem hosted radio’s American Top 40 for the first time.

1997 – The Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, launched by NASA in December 1996, entered the Martian atmosphere.

1871 – The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad Company introduced the first narrow-gauge locomotive, the Montezuma.

1878 – Actor – singer – composer George M. Cohan (Over There, The Yankee Doodle Boy, Give My Regards to Broadway, Mary’s a Grand Old Name, You’re a Grand Old Flag, Harrigan) was born in Providence, Rhode Island.

1890 – Idaho became the 43^rd of the United States.

1976 – An Israeli commando unit rescued 103 hostages in a raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda. Four terrorists had hijacked an Air France airliner on its way to Paris from Tel Aviv on June 27.  They released the French crew and non-Jewish passengers, while retaining 105 Jewish and Israeli hostages.  Seven pro-Palestinian guerrilla hijackers, 20 Ugandan soldiers and 3 hostages were killed in the raid.

1986 – Ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov became a U.S. citizen in ceremonies at Ellis Island, New York Harbor.