Category Archives: History

1819 – Poet Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, Passage to India) was born in West Hills, NY.

1859 – The clock known as “Big Ben” went into operation in London.

1889 – After a month of heavy rains, the Conemaugh River Dam in Johnstown, PA, broke, flooding the city and killing more than 2,200 people.

1902 – In Pretoria, South Africa, Great Britain and the Boer states sign the Treaty of Vereeniging, officially ending the Boer War.

1961 – South Africa became an independent nation, as it withdrew from the British Commonwealth.

1962 – Former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel for his crimes during the Nazi Holocaust.

1977 – The Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was completed.

1431 – Jeanne d’Arc, or Joan of Arc, was burned at the stake at Rouen in English-controlled Normandy, France.

1672 – Piotr Alekseevich Romanov (Peter the Great) was born in Moscow.

1868 – At the request of General John A. Logan, the national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, Memorial Day was observed for the first time in the United States.  It was called Decoration Day because the General had seen women decorating graves of Civil War heroes.

1879 – William Vanderbilt renamed Gilmore’s Garden to Madison Square Garden.

1908 – Mel Blanc, ‘the man of a thousand voices;’ did cartoon voices for Barney Rubble, Dino the Dinosaur, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, was born in San Francisco, CA.

1911 – The first race of the Indianapolis 500 was held.

1912 – Playwright Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof, Enter Laughing, Mrs. Gibbons’ Boys) was born in New York City.

1922 – Former President William Howard Taft dedicated the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

1971 – The U.S. launched the unmanned space probe Mariner 9 on a mission to gather scientific information on Mars.

1630 – Charles II, King of England 1660 – 1685, was born.

1736 – American revolutionary Patrick Henry was born in Hanover County, VA.

1790 – Rhode Island became the last of the original 13 states to ratify the United States Constitution.

1827 – The first nautical institution in the United States, Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin’s Lancasterian School, opened in Nantucket, MA.

1848 – Wisconsin became the 30th state to enter the union.

1903 – Actor and comedian Bob Hope was born in London.

1906 – Author T.H. White (The Once and Future King) was born in Bombay, India.

1916 – The U.S. President’s flag was adopted by executive order.

1917 – John F. Kennedy, 35^th President of the United States, was born in Brookline, MA.

1942 – Adolph Hitler ordered all Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left side of their coats.

1953 – Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide, became the first humans to reach the top of Mount Everest.

1962 – John Buck O’Neil became the first Black coach in major-league baseball, when he accepted the post with the Chicago Cubs.

1779 – Poet Thomas Moore (Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms, The Last Rose of Summer, Oft in the Stilly Night) was born in Dublin.

1888 – Jim Thorpe, Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon and pentathlon (Stockholm 1912); professional baseball and football player, was born in Prague, OK.

1908 – Author Ian Fleming (James Bond series) was born in London.

1929 – Warner Brothers debuted the first all-color talking picture, On With the Show, at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City.

1934 – The Dionne quintuplets were born near Callender, Ontario to Oliva and Elzire Dionne. Marie, Cecile, Yvonne, Emilie and Annette were the first quintuplets to survive infancy.

1935 – John Steinbeck published his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat.

1937 – The government of Germany formed the state-owned automobile company, Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH.

1953 – The first 3-D cartoon, Melody, a Walt Disney creation/RKO picture, premiered at the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood, CA.

1703 – After winning access to the Baltic Sea, Czar Peter I founded St. Petersburg as the new Russian capital.

1794 – Industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in New York City.

1818 – Amelia Jenks Bloomer, women’s rights advocate and newspaper publisher, was born in Homer, NY.

1878 – Dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, CA.

1894 – Author Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, MD.

1937 – Ceremonies marking the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge were held in San Francisco, CA.

1941 – The British navy sunk the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic near France, killing more than 2,000 men.

1994 – Two decades after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, returned to Russia.

1637 – During the Pequot War, an allied Mohegan and English force under Capt. John Mason attacked a Pequot village in Connecticut and massacred some 500 Indian adults and children.

1799 – Poet Aleksandr Pushkin was born in Moscow.

1864 – President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation creating the Montana Territory.

1868 – At the end of a 2-month trial, the U.S. Senate narrowly failed to convict President Andrew Johnson of impeachment charges levied against him by the House of Representatives 3 months earlier.

1886 – Singer – actor Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer) was born in Srednik, Russia.

1895 – Actress Norma Talmadge was born in Jersey City, NJ.  (Some sources also list her birth year as 1894.)

1896 – Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov was crowned Czar Nicholas II of Russia in Moscow.

1897 – Dracula, by Irish writer Bram Stoker, went on sale in London.

1907 – Actor John Wayne was born in Winterset, IA.

1913 – The Actors’ Equity Association was organized in New York City.

1977 – The man called “The Human Fly,” George Willig, scaled the World Trade Center in New York City, by affixing himself to a window washer mechanism and walking straight up until falling into police custody when he reached the top.

1803 – Writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, MA.

1889 – Engineer Igor Sikorsky who developed the first successful helicopter was born in Kiev, Russia.

1895 – British playwright Oscar Wilde was sent to prison after being convicted of sodomy.

1927 – The Ford Motor Company announced that it would cease production of its popular automobile model, the Model T, and replace it with the more modern Model A.

Model T

1927 – The Movietone News was shown for the first time at the Sam Harris Theatre in New York City.  Charles Lindbergh’s epic flight aboard the Spirit of St. Louis was featured.  Movietone newsreels were produced until 1967 when competition from TV news forced them into extinction.

1927 – Writer Robert Ludlum (Bourne series) was born in New York City.

1935 – Babe Ruth, then of the Boston Braves, hit his 713^th and 714^th home runs – the last of his career – at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh in a game against the Pirates.

1977 – As part of its “Cultural Revolution,” the Chinese government lifted a decades-old ban on the writings of William Shakespeare.

1543 – Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus died.

1816 – Artist Emanuel Leutze (Washington Crossing the Delaware, Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth, Columbus Before the Queen) was born in Würtemberg, Germany.

1844 – Samuel F.B. Morse tapped out the message “What hath God wrought” in Morse code, inaugurating America’s telegraph industry.  The message was sent from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, MD.

1883 – The Brooklyn Bridge, linking the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, officially opened.  Designed by John A. Roebling, it took 14 years to build and – at 1,595 feet in length – it was then the world’s longest suspension bridge.

1931 – The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) began service on the Columbian run between New York City and Washington, D.C.  The passenger train was the first train with air conditioning throughout.

1935 – Major league baseball held its first night game, thanks to recently-installed lights at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field.  The Cincinnati Reds defeated Philadelphia 2-1.