Category Archives: History

1541 – Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto reached the Mississippi River, south of present-day Memphis, TN.

1847 – Robert W. Thomson of England patented the rubber tire on this day.

1848 – Playwright Oscar Hammerstein I was born in Sceczin, Germany.

1879 – George Selden of Rochester, NY applied for the first automobile patent, or what he called a “road engine.”

1884 – Harry S. Truman, the 33^rd U.S. President, was born in Lamar, MO.

1945 – Great Britain and the U.S. celebrate Victory in Europe, or V-E Day.  The Allied Forces had achieved victory in Europe with the unconditional surrender of Germany.

1973 – The American Indian Movement (AIM) ended its 71-day siege of Wounded Knee, site of the infamous 1890 massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. Army, and surrendered to federal authorities.

1789 – The first Presidential Inaugural Ball was held in New York City.

1833 – Composer Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany.

1840 – Composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Russia.

1901 – Actor Gary Cooper was born in Helena, MT.

1912 – Columbia University approved final plans for awarding the Pulitzer Prize in several categories.

1912 – The first airplane equipped with a machine gun flew over College Park, MD.

1915 – On its return trip from New York to Liverpool, England, the British ocean liner, Lusitania, was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 lives people.

1919 – Eva (Evita) Peron, Argentina’s spiritual leader and wife of former president Juan Peron, was born in Buenos Aires.

1960 – Leonid Brezhnev was selected president of the Soviet Union.

1994 – Almost 3 months after it was stolen from an Oslo museum, police recovered Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

1851 – Dr. John Gorrie of Apalachicola FL, patented the mechanical refrigerator.

1851 – Linus Yale of Newport, NY became well known for his patent of the clock-type lock.

1856 – Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was born in Frieberg, Germany.

1856 – Robert E. Peary, first person to reach the North Pole, was born in Cresson, PA.

1895 – Silent film screen star Rudolph Valentino was born Rodolfo Alfonso di Valentina D’Antonguolla in Puglia, Italy.

1933 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

1937 – The German airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built, exploded as it arrived at Lakehurst, NJ.

1940 – John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath.

1941 – Joseph Stalin became the premier of Russia.

1942 – Lte. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright surrendered all American troops in the Philippines to the Japanese.

1954 – Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in Oxford, England with a time of 3:59.4 seconds.

1957 – Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book Profiles in Courage.

1959 – Pablo Picasso’s painting of a Dutch girl was sold for $154,000 in London, the highest price paid at the time for a painting by a living artist.

1994 – A rail tunnel beneath the English Channel joining Great Britain with France, called the “Chunnel,” officially opened.

1816 – Poet John Keats had his first poem published by The Examiner.

1818 – Socialist writer Karl Marx was born in Moselle, Germany.

1821 – Napoleon Bonaparte died in a prison on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena.

1847 – The American Medical Association was organized in Philadelphia, PA.

1862 – The Mexican army defeated the French military in the town of Puebla de Los Angeles, as the French tried to reach México City.

1893 – The U.S. experienced the worst economic crisis to date, as stock prices plummeted and major railroads entered into receivership.  More than 15,000 businesses went bankrupt and 15 – 20% of the work force was unemployed.  Within seven months, over 600 banks had closed.

1961 – Navy Commander Alan Shepard, Jr., became the first American in space when he was launched from Cape Canaveral, FL, aboard the Freedom 7 capsule.

1776 – Rhode Island became the first North American colony to renounce its allegiance to Britain.

1865 – President Abraham Lincoln was laid to rest in his hometown of Springfield, IL.

1886 – Emile Berliner patented the first practical phonograph, better known as the gramophone.

1932 – Al Capone was jailed in the Atlanta Penitentiary for tax evasion.

1948 – Norman Mailer published his first novel, The Naked and the Dead.

1961 – The first group of “Freedom Riders” left Washington, D.C., to challenge racial segregation on interstate buses and in bus terminals.

1964 – The Pulitzer Prize jury failed for the first time to award winners in the areas of fiction, drama and music.

1970 – Four students at Kent State University in Ohio were fatally shot by National Guard members during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration.

1977 – Former President Richard M. Nixon spoke with interviewer, David Frost in the first of four television interviews.

1469 – Philosopher and writer Niccolo Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy.

1802 – Washington, D.C., was incorporated as a city.

1933 – Nellie Ross became the first female director of the U.S. Mint.

1944 – Dr. Robert Woodward and Dr. William Doering produced the first synthetic quinine at Harvard University.

1952 – Lte. Col. Joseph O. Fletcher and Lte. Col. William P. Benedict landed the first airplane at the North Pole.

1979 – Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female Prime Minister.

1883 – Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody) staged his first Wild West show.

1884 – Construction began on the first skyscraper in America; the 10-story Home Insurance Building located on the corner of LaSalle and Adams in Chicago, IL.  It was demolished in 1931.

1926 – The Ford Motor Company becomes the first in the U.S. to adopt a 5-day, 40-hour work week for its automotive factories.

1931 – The Empire State Building in New York City was dedicated.

1960 – The Soviets shot down an American U-2 plane piloted by the C.I.A.’s Francis Gary Powers.  Seventeen months later, the Soviets exchanged Powers for Russian spy Rudolf Abel whom the CIA had exposed.

1971 – Amtrak went into service.