January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
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January
January 1
— 1863: Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation.
— 1959: Fidel Castro takes power in Cuba.
— 1804: Haiti declares independence from France.
— 45 BCE: The Julian calendar takes effect. With slight changes in 1582 (the Gregorian calendar) the modern calendar is born. It was called the Julian calendar because it was invented by Julius Caesar, with a lot of help from the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes. The Julian calendar had 365 days and added an extra day every four years (leap year) to February. By the 1500s it was clear that the Julian calendar was not in sync with the actual solar year. This meant that the first day of spring was not close to March 21. Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull for the adoption of a new calendar which is known as the Gregorian calendar. It is the same as the Julian calendar except there are no leap years for years ending in “00” unless the year is exactly divisible by 400. Example: the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, but the year 2000 was. To align the Gregorian calendar with the solar year, 10 days were skipped in October 1582. The day after October 4 was designated as October 15, 1582. Use of the Gregorian calendar spread throughout Europe. Because of antagonism with the Vatican, Britain and its Empire did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until September 1752.
January 2
— 1492: Granada, the last Muslim stronghold, falls to Spanish forces, ending the “Reconquista” and the unification of Spain.
— 1788: Georgia is the fourth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
January 3
— 1959: Alaska is admitted as the 49th state. The Flag Act of 1818 set the standard for the U.S. flag: the modern rule of having 13 red and white stripes representing the 13 original states and the number of stars match the current number of states. Every time a new state joined the union a star was added to the flag on the following Fourth of July. Starting on July 4, 1912, the American flag had 48 stars (you see those flags in World War II movies). The last two states, Alaska and Hawaii, both joined in 1959. However, Alaska was admitted as a state on January 3, 1959, and Hawaii not until August 21, 1959. This meant that a star was added on July 4, 1959, representing Alaska but the 50th star was not added until July 4, 1960, representing Hawaii. So, for one year from July 1959 until July 1960 the U.S. had a 49-star flag (they are pretty rare). Those flags had 7 rows of 7 stars, but they were not in orderly columns, the even numbered rows were a little indented compared to the odd numbered rows. The present 50-star flag has existed since July 4, 1960.
— 1967: Jack Ruby dies in a Dallas hospital while awaiting his second trial. Some people claim that Ruby “silenced” Lee Harvey Oswald because Ruby knew he was dying. Not true. Ruby did not know he was dying in November 1963 when he shot Oswald. Ruby only found out he had cancer in December 1966, over three years after the assassination.
January 4
— 1896: Utah is admitted as the 45th state.
— 1948: Burma becomes an independent nation. Burma had been a British colony since the 1880s. In 1989 the name of the country was officially changed to Myanmar.
January 5
— 1895: Alfred Dreyfus suffers military degradation in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire in Paris. His insignia and medals were stripped from his uniform, his sword was broken over the knee of the degrader, and he was marched around the grounds in his disgraced uniform to be ridiculed by his peers. French artillery officer Dreyfus, who happened to be Jewish, was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. He was later fully exonerated, pardoned, and reinstated into the French Army. The Dreyfus Affair is still remembered because it is almost universally agreed that he was convicted simply because of anti-Semitism. There had never been any compelling evidence of Dreyfus’s guilt and the person who was forwarding military secrets to the Germans was later discovered.
— 1933: Former President Calvin Coolidge dies of coronary thrombosis in North Hampton, Massachusetts.
January 6
— 2021: A mob of approximately 2500 supporters of President Donald Trump storm the Capital Building in Washington D.C.
— 1919: Former president Theodore Roosevelt dies in Oyster Bay, New York. At 42 years old, Roosevelt was the youngest president in the history of the United States. John Kennedy was the youngest elected (43 years old). Roosevelt became president when his predecessor, William McKinley, was assassinated and Roosevelt was elevated from vice president.
— 1912: New Mexico is admitted as the 47th state.
January 7
— 1610: Galileo Galilei, using a homemade telescope, discovers moons orbiting the planet Jupiter. Over the next few weeks, he confirms four moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto). The discovery of the moons orbiting Jupiter, along with Galileo’s observations that the planet Venus appears in phases (similar to those of the Earth’s moon), provided evidence that Copernicus was right that we exist in a heliocentric system and everything does not revolve around the earth.
— 1800: Future president Millard Fillmore is born in Cayuga County, New York.
January 8
— 1815: The Battle of New Orleans. Americans achieve their greatest land victory over the British in the War of 1812. The British suffer over 2000 casualties (approximately 300 dead) and the Americans only 71 casualties (13 dead). American Commanding General Andrew Jackson becomes a national hero. The Treaty of Ghent had been signed on December 24, 1814, ending the War of 1812. However, it took 6 weeks for the news to travel by sea from Europe to the U.S. Thus, American and British forces were unaware that the war had ended when the Battle of New Orleans took place on January 8, 1815.
— 1652: Galileo Galilei dies in Tuscany, Italy.
January 9
— 1788: Connecticut is the fifth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
— 1861: Mississippi is the second state to secede from the Union.
— 1913: Future president Richard Milhous Nixon is born in Yorba Linda, California. In 1974, Nixon becomes the only president in American history to resign from office.
January 10
— 1776: Thomas Paine publishes his pamphlet Common Sense, arguing in favor of American independence from Britain. Here is a quote from Common Sense: “To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever, and tho’ himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in Kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an Ass for a Lion.”
— 1861: Florida is the third state to secede from the Union.
January 11
— 1964: U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry announces a definitive link between smoking and cancer.
— 1861: Alabama is the fourth state to secede from the Union.
— 1755: Alexander Hamilton is born on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies. There is actually a dispute whether he was born in 1755 or 1757. There is a famous fallacy that Hamilton could not be president because he was not a native born American. It is true that the U.S. Constitution limits the presidency to natural born citizens. However, there is a specific exemption. Article II, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution states in pertinent part: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.” Hamilton moved to New York in 1772 and was a U.S. citizen at the time the Constitution was ratified in 1788.
January 12
— 2010: A 7.0 earthquake hits Haiti, with approximately 220,000 deaths, another 300,000 injured, and around 1.5 million left homeless. The tremor lasted for 35 seconds.
January 13
— 2021: President Donald Trump is impeached for the second time; this time charged with “Incitement of Insurrection”.
— 1929: Legendary Old West “lawman” Wyatt Earp dies in his home in Los Angeles, California.
January 14
— 1784: The Continental Congress ratifies the Treaty of Paris (signed on September 3, 1783) formally ending the American Revolution and officially establishing the United States as an independent and sovereign nation. The three Americans who negotiated the treaty are John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay. “Article 1st” of the treaty states that Britain acknowledges the United States “to be free sovereign and Independent States”. “Article 2d” sets forth the boundaries of the new United States, essentially from Maine to Georgia along the Atlantic coast and the western boundary along the Mississippi River.
January 15
— 1929: Martin Luther King Jr. is born in Atlanta Georgia. Not only one of the greatest civil rights leaders in American history, Dr. King was also an advocate for the poor and an opponent of the Vietnam War. Dr. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. On November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the King Holiday Bill into law, designating the third Monday in January as a federal holiday in observance of Dr. King.
— 1559: The coronation of Queen Elizabeth I occurs in London. Her parents were Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth I succeeded to the throne on November 17, 1558 upon the death of her half-sister Mary. Elizabeth I reigned for 45 years until her death on March 24, 1603. She was the last Tudor monarch.
January 16
— 1991: The Persian Gulf War begins. The war ends with an Iraqi defeat and retreat from Kuwait on February 28, 1991.
— 1919: The 18th Amendment is ratified (approved by 3/4 of the states) and became part of the U.S. Constitution. The 18th Amendment made the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol illegal in the United States. It might be the best example of unintended consequences. Prohibition helped start women’s liberation, propelled the Jazz Age, and essentially created Organized Crime in the U.S.
January 17
— 1920: Prohibition goes into effect. The primary language of the 18th Amendment is contained in section 1 where it outlaws “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors”. To interpret this language, and to set definitions, on October 28, 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act. The real name of the law was the National Prohibition Act, but it was better known as the Volstead Act because it had been sponsored by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Minnesota Representative Andrew Volstead. Although passed on October 28, 1919, the Volstead Act and prohibition took effect on January 17, 1920.
— 1706: Benjamin Franklin is born in Boston, Massachusetts.
— 1893: Former president Rutherford B. Hayes dies in Fremont, Ohio.
January 18
— 1862: Former president John Tyler dies in Richmond, Virginia. Tyler was the first vice president to become president upon the death of his predecessor. William Henry Harrison died after only one month in office and Tyler was raised to the presidency. Harrison had the nickname of “Old Tippecanoe”. That is why they had possibly the most famous campaign slogan in American history: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”. Although he had been a vice president and president of the United States, Tyler was elected as a member of the Confederate House of Representatives and agreed to serve. However, Tyler died before he had a chance to take a seat in the Confederate Congress.
January 19
— 1915: Germany bombs England with Zeppelins for the first time. Before World War I, Britain had been untouched by warfare for centuries. The last time Britain was invaded was the Norman Conquest of 1066. The last time the island of Great Britain was threatened was by the Spanish Armada in 1588. But due to the recent advances in aircraft, warfare had come home to Britain. German rigid airships were known as Zeppelins because of the person who invented them: Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin. Zeppelins were filled with hydrogen gas which proved to be a very poor decision as demonstrated in the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.
— 1861: Georgia is the fifth state to secede from the Union.
— 1809: Edgar Allan Poe is born in Boston, Massachusetts.
January 20
— 1981: Iran Hostage Crisis ends with the release of the 52 U.S. captives which had been held in Tehran, Iran for 444 days. On November 4, 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy and took 52 Americans hostage.
January 21
— 1793: During the French Revolution, King Louis XVI is executed by guillotine at the Place de la Révolution in Paris. Fun fact: he was the last king to live at the Palace of Versailles.
— 1977: On his first full day in office, President Jimmy Carter grants an unconditional pardon to American men who had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War.
January 22
— 1973: Former president Lyndon B. Johnson dies at his ranch in Texas. Unfortunately for LBJ, he is mostly remembered for the disastrous Vietnam War. However, if not for Vietnam (a giant “if”), Johnson would be known as the president who did more for civil rights than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. LBJ also passed the voting rights act of 1965, which prohibits states from imposing qualifications or practices to deny the right to vote on account of race. His predecessor, John Kennedy, was in favor of such policies, but he never would have gotten those 2 laws through the Congress. From his days as Senate Majority Leader, Johnson knew how to get laws passed. And the fact that he was from Texas, a southern state, help LBJ in his negotiations with the powerful Southern Democrats in Congress who were opposing any civil rights legislation. And it was not just civil rights that he excelled. In his 5 years as president LBJ enacted many laws that he referred to as the “Great Society”, including Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, urban renewal, Head Start (a Federal program promoting school readiness of children from low-income families to be ready for kindergarten), college financial aid, and the first broad federal investment in elementary and high schools.
January 23
— 1968: USS Pueblo is captured by North Korean ships off the coast of North Korea. The Pueblo is still held in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. The Pueblo is the only commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy held in captivity. At the time of the capture there were 83 Americans serving on board the Pueblo. One sailor was killed. Three days earlier, 31 North Korean commandos had covertly gone to Seoul in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate South Korean President Park Chung-hee; 26 South Koreans were killed in that incident. There were calls throughout the U.S. to send military forces to North Korea to either retrieve the American hostages or punish North Korea. But this was in the middle of the Vietnam War and the Lyndon Johnson administration was very against possibly starting another war in Asia. The 82 American hostages were beaten and tortured. Negotiations dragged on. Finally, on December 23, 1968, exactly 11 months after the Pueblo’s capture, the 82 American hostages were freed upon the U.S. signing a document that admitted American guilt. The U.S. Navy had not done anything wrong. The Pueblo was in international waters. But the American government was willing to sign the fraudulent document in exchange for the freedom of the 82 U.S. sailors.
January 24
— 1965: Winston Churchill dies at the age of 90. Churchill is often compared very favorably to his predecessor as Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. But the negative assessments of Chamberlain are unjustified. Neville Chamberlain has been ridiculed for the 1938 Munich Agreement between Britain and France on one side and Nazi Germany on the other. Instead of being derided, Chamberlain should be praised. Chamberlain tried to avoid a world war. He failed, but at least he tried. And even though he did not completely avoid World War II, his actions ensured that Britain did not lose the war. Britain remaining in the war throughout 1940 and into 1941 allowed for an eventual Allies victory. As some historians have phrased it, Chamberlain did not win World War II, but he prevented the UK from losing the Battle of Britain in 1940 by making sure that Britain had enough fighter planes and an adequate radar system.
January 25
— 1971: Idi Amin overthrows President Milton Obote in Uganda. Obote had led Uganda to independence from Britain in 1962 and became the country’s first elected leader. However, Obote had suspended the constitution, arbitrarily detained his opponents, and refused to have elections. Amin’s brutal dictatorship killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Amin was eventually overthrown in April 1979.
— 1971: Charles Manson is convicted of murder.
January 26
— 1788: The “First Fleet” arrives in Sydney Cove and establishes the first permanent European settlement in Australia. The date is now celebrated as the national holiday called Australia Day. According to the National Library of Australia website: “Prior to 1935, 26 January was known as First Landing Day or Foundation Day in Australian states and territories, but from 1935 onwards all jurisdictions used the name Australia Day to mark the date. Australia Day was not consistently celebrated as a public holiday across Australia until 1994.”
— 1837: Michigan is admitted as the 26th state.
January 27
— 1967: Apollo 1 (originally designated AS-204) catches fire on the launchpad killing all three crew members: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
— 1973: After years of negotiations and secret talks, the Paris Peace Accords are finally signed, ending America’s war in Vietnam.
January 28
— 1986: Space Shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds into its flight, killing all 7 crew members.
January 29
— 1861: Kansas is admitted as the 34th state. This occurs in the midst of the secession crisis when 11 states secede from the Union to form the Confederacy.
— 1843: Future president William McKinley is born in Niles, Ohio.
January 30
— 1835: President Andrew Jackson is shot at by Richard Lawrence outside the United States Capitol building, but the gun misfires. The 67-year-old Jackson then starts clubbing his would-be assassin with his cane. Lawrence then pulls out a second loaded gun and pulls the trigger but it also misfires. This was the first known attempt to assassinate a U.S. president.
— 1948: Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi is assassinated in New Delhi, India.
— 1882: Future president Franklin D. Roosevelt is born in Hyde Park, New York.
January 31
— 1606: Guy Fawkes, leader of the Gunpowder Plot, is executed in London. On November 5, 1605, Guy Fawkes was caught in a plan to blow up the English Parliament. November 5 is annually celebrated in the United Kingdom as Guy Fawkes Day.
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February
February 1
— 2003: Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrates during reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. All 7 astronauts on board are killed. As a result, NASA suspended space shuttle flights for more than two years as it investigated the cause of the Columbia disaster.
— 1908: Lisbon Regicide. King Carlos I of Portugal and his heir-apparent, Prince Luis Filipe, are assassinated by Republican revolutionaries in Lisbon. This was the beginning of the end for the Portuguese monarchy. As a result of the assassinations, the crown passed to the younger son, who became King Manuel II. The king was just 18 years old and only lasted on the throne for two years. The revolution in 1910 ended the Portuguese monarchy and established the Portuguese Republic on October 5, 1910.
— 1978: Harriet Tubman is the first African American woman to be featured on a U.S. postage stamp.
— 1861: Texas is the seventh state to secede from the Union (after only being a U.S. state for just over 15 years).
February 2
— 1943: German Sixth Army surrenders after Battle of Stalingrad. The German commander, Friedrich Paulus, surrendered along with some of the German troops on January 31. The remaining German troops surrendered on February 2. In a futile attempt to keep Paulus from surrendering, Adolf Hitler promoted Paulus from general to field marshal on Hitler’s theory that no German field marshal had ever been taken prisoner. Paulus received notice of his promotion on January 31. Later that same day, he surrendered to the Soviets. Although World War II in Europe would drag on for another two years, Nazi Germany never recovered from this defeat. The Battle of Stalingrad began on August 23, 1942. It is estimated that the number of dead from the over 5 months of fighting, including the Soviet and German military, as well as civilians, totaled approximately 1.9 million people. Approximately 90,000 Germans were captured by the Soviets. Less than 6,000 ever returned to Germany. The rest died in Soviet captivity.
— 1913: Grand Central Terminal officially opens in New York City.
— 1887: First Groundhog Day at Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Every year on February 2, people gather in that small Pennsylvania town and take a groundhog, named Punxsutawney Phil, out of his burrow. According to the tradition, if Phil sees his shadow there will be 6 more weeks of winter. If Phil does not see his shadow, then there will be an early spring.
February 3
— 1870: The 15th Amendment is ratified and becomes part of the U.S. Constitution. The amendment reads in its entirety:
“Section 1
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
— 1959: The day the music died. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson) die in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.
— 1924: Former president Woodrow Wilson dies in Washington, D.C.
February 4
— 1945: Yalta Conference begins. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin meet on the Crimea Peninsula on the Black Sea. This was the last meeting of the “Big Three” of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. Roosevelt died two months later on April 12, 1945. At the Yalta Conference, FDR pressed Stalin for a specific commitment of going to war against Japan once Germany was defeated. Stalin agreed to enter the war on Japan within three months of the surrender of Germany.
February 5
— 1994: Byron De La Beckwith is finally convicted of the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP. De La Beckwith was a white supremacist and killed Evers because of his race and work for the NAACP. De La Beckwith was charged with murder in 1964. However, two different all-male, all-white juries failed to reach verdicts. It took another 30 years, but De La Beckwith was finally convicted in 1994. De La Beckwith died while still incarcerated on January 21, 2001.
February 6
— 1952: King George VI dies, his daughter Elizabeth becomes queen.
— 1788: Massachusetts is the sixth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
— 1911: Future president Ronald Reagan is born in Tampico, Illinois.
February 7
— 1992: Maastricht Treaty is signed by 12 countries creating the European Union (EU). The name comes from the Dutch city where the conference was held. The 12 countries were: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom.
February 8
— 1587: Mary, Queen of Scots, is beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle.
February 10
— 1763: The Seven Years’ War (known in America as the French and Indian War) ends with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by Britain, France, and Spain. Pursuant to the terms of the treaty, France gave up all of its territories in mainland North America. Although Britain won the war, it eventually lost because of the policies resulting from the large debt as a result of that war. People in the British government felt that the colonists in America should pay for that enormous expense. A year later, in 1764, the British government enacted the Sugar Act. The following year the government in London passed the Stamp Act. These measures were the beginning of Britain taxing the American colonies. “Taxation without representation” was a primary reason for the resulting American Revolution and the independence of the United States.
February 11
— 1990: Nelson Mandela is released after 27 years in prison in South Africa. Mandela was the leader of the anti-apartheid movement. Apartheid was the legal system in South Africa from 1948 until 1994 under the all-white government which imposed racial segregation. Non-white South Africans (a large majority) were required to live in separate areas from whites and use separate public facilities.
February 12
— 1809: Charles Darwin is born in Shrewsbury, England.
— 1809: Future president Abraham Lincoln is born in Larue County, Kentucky. Yes, Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same exact day.
February 13
— 1945: The Allies begin to firebomb Dresden, Germany, completely destroying the city. The bombing continued through February 15. The estimated number of deaths varies wildly. However, the city of Dresden stated in 2008 that approximately 25,000 lost their lives in the February 13-15 bombings. Of note: American POW (and future author) Kurt Vonnegut survived the bombing by hiding in a slaughterhouse, as later described in his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
February 14
— 1912: Arizona is admitted as the 48th state. It is the last of the contiguous states.
— 1859: Oregon is admitted as the 33rd state.
— 1929: Al Capone consolidates control of organized crime in Chicago by having 7 members of the North Side Gang murdered in what became known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
February 15
— 1898: American battleship U.S.S. Maine explodes in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, killing 266 crewmen, leading to the Spanish-American War. Historians now believe the explosion was an accident and not the result of Spanish actions.
— 1933: President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt is in an open convertible in Miami, Florida when Giuseppe Zangara shoots into the car. He misses Roosevelt but accidentally shoots the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who was standing next to the car talking to FDR. Cermak dies on March 6, 1933, as a result of the shooting. Giuseppe Zangara was executed in Florida’s electric chair on March 20, 1933.
February 16
— 1804: Naval Lieutenant Stephen Decatur leads 75 U.S. sailors into Tripoli Harbor to burn the U.S.S. Philadelphia. In the early 1800s, the Barbary states (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli) would raid merchant ships unless the governments of those ships paid the Barbary states to not attack that particular country’s commercial ships. The United States refused to pay. President Thomas Jefferson sent two large American frigates to the Barbary Coast (coastal regions of central and western North Africa). One of those frigates, the U.S.S. Philadelphia, ran aground on a reef off the shore of Tripoli in October 1803. As a result, Tripolitan sailors were able to capture the ship. On February 16, 1804, Decatur led the covert mission into Tripoli harbor and burned the U.S.S. Philadelphia so it could not be used by the Tripolitans.
February 17
— 1979: China invades Vietnam. By the late 1970s there was a split in the communist world between countries aligned with the Soviet Union and those following China. In November 1978 Vietnam signed a mutual defense treaty with the USSR. This strained relations between Vietnam and China. In December 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia to topple the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge was an ally of China. These factors led to the Chinese invasion of Vietnam as a punitive measure. The Sino-Vietnamese War ended with China unilaterally ceasing fire on March 16, 1979.
February 18
— 1967: American theoretical physicist, Robert Oppenheimer, dies in his home in Princeton, NJ from throat cancer at age 62. During WWII he was the head of the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb. When he witnessed the first nuclear explosion he thought of words from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
February 19
— 1847: The first rescue party arrives at Truckee Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to save the Donner Party. In 1846, a wagon train which became known as the Donner Party, was headed to California. They became trapped in the snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and resorted to eating those who died. Out of 87 people only 46 survived. The fourth and final rescue party did not arrive at Truckee Lake until April 1847.
February 20
— 1962: John Glenn is the first American to orbit the earth aboard Friendship 7.
February 21
— 1965: Malcolm X is shot and killed during a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. He was only 39 years old.
— 1940: Civil rights activist John Lewis is born in Pike County, Alabama.
February 22
— 1732: Future president George Washington is born in Westmoreland County, Virginia. The British Empire had not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar. It was still using the Julian calendar. Thus, Washington was actually born on February 11, 1731, using the Julian calendar. However, in 1752 Britain (including its American colonies) adopted the Gregorian calendar which moved Washington’s birthday 11 days to February 22. But why did the year switch from 1731 to 1732? The new year starts on January 1 in the Gregorian calendar. Originally in the Julian calendar, January 1 was also the start of the new year. However, after the fall of the western Roman Empire, some parts of Europe (including England) changed the start of the new year to March 25 to conform with the Christian festival of the Annunciation (when, according to Christian faith, the angel Gabriel visited the Virgin Mary to tell her that she would be the mother of the savior). When the law adopting the Gregorian calendar went into effect on September 2, 1752, 11 days were skipped, and the next day was September 14, 1752. But the law also changed the beginning of the new year to January 1. Since Washington was born in February, this also retroactively changed the year he was born under the new (Gregorian) calendar.
— 1974: Samuel Byck unsuccessfully tries to hijack a plane out of Baltimore-Washington International Airport to crash it into the White House to assassinate President Richard Nixon. While still on the ground, Byck shot the pilot and copilot. He then realized that he would not be able to complete the assassination, so Byck shot himself.
February 23
— 1945: U.S. flag is raised on Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima. The U.S. marines invaded Iwo Jima on February 19. American military leaders determined that Iwo Jima was necessary for several reasons. 1. A radar site on the island was providing early warning to the Japanese home islands of American bombing raids. 2. Japanese fighter planes were based there to try to intercept American bombers. 3. Iwo Jima could provide a base for American fighter planes and could serve as an emergency landing place for American B-29 bombers. Iwo Jima is a very small island, approximately 8 square miles (21 square kilometers) approximately 660 miles (1062 kilometers) south of Tokyo. The island is dominated by an extinct volcano known as Mount Suribachi. Most people have seen the famous photograph of the marines raising the flag on the top of Mount Suribachi. That photograph was the basis of the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, an enormous statue located outside of Washington D.C. in Arlington, VA (dedicated on November 10, 1954, the 179th anniversary of the U.S. Marine Corps). The photograph, taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, became one of the most famous images of World War II (Rosenthal won a Pulitzer Prize for that photo). But it was actually the second flag raised on Mount Suribachi. On the morning of February 23, marines finally reached the summit of Mount Suribachi. They raised a small American flag, much to the delight of American servicemen still fighting on Iwo Jima. Later that day, the original flag was taken down and a larger flag was raised in that same location (so it could be more easily seen). It was that second flag raising that was captured in the iconic photo. U.S. forces suffered 6,871 killed and 19,217 wounded in the Battle for Iwo Jima. According to the United States Navy: “Of the roughly 21,000 Japanese defenders, 216 survived the battle to be taken prisoner, and an estimated 3,000 went into hiding during the U.S. occupation of the island. By August 1945, most of these had either been killed, captured, or had surrendered, but one group did not lay down its arms until 1949.”
— 1848: Former president John Quincy Adams dies in Washington D.C.
February 24
— 1868: U.S. House of Representatives votes articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson, making him the first president to be impeached in U.S. history. He was later acquitted in the Senate. Article I, Section 2, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution reads in pertinent part: “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.” (Note: that is the spelling of “chuse” in the U.S. Constitution.) Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 reads: “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.” Article I, Section 3, Clause 7 reads: “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”
February 25
— 1991: Warsaw Pact dissolves. The Warsaw Pact was the communist counterpart to NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It was a collective defense treaty established by the Soviet Union and 7 soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania (Albania withdrew in 1968). The Warsaw Pact was created on May 14, 1955. It became irrelevant after the dissolution of the East European communist governments beginning in 1989.
February 26
— 1993: World Trade Center in New York City is bombed. Most people know about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack when planes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center (as well as the Pentagon). But the 1993 incident is overlooked. A terrorist bomb exploded in a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center, killing 6 and injuring more than 1,000 people. The FBI and NYC police arrested most of the terrorists before they could escape from the United States. The mastermind of the bombing, Ramzi Yousef, was finally captured in Pakistan in 1995. According to Yousef, the point of the bombing was to topple one World Trade Center tower, with the collapsing debris knocking down the second. Sadly, this was accomplished in the 9/11 attacks 8 years later.
February 27
— 1933: The Reichstag (German Parliament building) is set on fire less than one month after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Hitler blamed the fire on the Communists. The Reichstag Fire Decree (Reichstagsbrandverordnung), enacted only one day after the fire, severely curtailed fundamental rights, subjected the police largely to the control of the national government and thereby created all sorts of opportunities for the persecution and elimination of political opponents. This led to mass arrests of people opposed to the Nazis. The members of the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933 (and published the following day). Officially titled the “Act for the Removal of the Distress of the People and the Reich”, the Enabling Act granted the government of the Reich (meaning Hitler and his cronies) with almost unlimited powers to enact laws. Simply stated, Hitler could enact laws without the consent of the Reichstag (German Parliament). This was the start of Hitler being granted dictatorial powers.
February 28
— 2013: Benedict XVI (originally Joseph Ratzinger) became the first pope in 600 years to resign. He became the 265th Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in 2005. He was succeeded the following month by Pope Francis.
February 29
— 1692: Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are the first 3 women arrested of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. This is the start of the Salem witch trials.
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March
March 1
— 1932: Charles Lindbergh’s infant son is kidnapped from the family home in Hopewell, New Jersey.
March 2
— 1836: Texas declares independence from Mexico.
March 3
— 1845: Florida is admitted as the 27th state.
March 4
— 1791: Vermont is admitted as the 14th state. This sets the precedent for admitting new states in addition to the original 13.
— 1933: Franklin Roosevelt is the last president inaugurated on March 4. Pursuant to the 20th Amendment, presidential inaugurations are moved to January 20 beginning 1937.
March 5
— 1770: Boston Massacre. British troops fire into a mob of American colonists killing five Americans.
March 6
— 1475: Michelangelo Buonarroti is born in in the Republic of Florence (modern Italy).
— 1857: The Supreme Court delivers the worst decision in the history of American jurisprudence: Dred Scott v. Sandford.
March 7
— 1965: Bloody Sunday. Peaceful civil rights marchers are brutally beaten by Alabama law enforcement officials as they cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama.
March 8
— 1874: Former president Millard Fillmore dies in Buffalo, New York.
— 1930: Former president William Howard Taft dies in Washington, D.C.
March 9
— 1945: U.S. launches massive fire bombing raid on Tokyo, destroying 16 square miles of the city and killing approximately 80,000 to 130,000 people.
March 10
— 1876: Alexander Graham Bell speaks the first words over a telephone to his assistant, saying: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
March 11
— 2011: Massive earthquake hits the northeastern portion of Honshu (largest island in Japan) causing a tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster.
March 12
— 1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt broadcasts his first fireside chat on the radio.
March 13
— 1881: Czar Alexander II is assassinated by a bomb in St. Petersburg, Russia.
— 1901: Former president Benjamin Harrison dies in Indianapolis, Indiana.
March 14
— 1879: Albert Einstein is born in Ulm, Germany.
March 15
— 44 BCE: The Ides of March. Julius Caesar is assassinated in the Roman Senate.
— 1820: Maine is admitted as the 23rd state. Up until that time Maine had been part of Massachusetts.
— 1767: Future president Andrew Jackson is born in the Waxhaws region. The exact location is unknown which makes it unclear whether he was born in North Carolina or South Carolina.
March 16
— 1751: Future president James Madison is born in Port Conway, Virginia.
March 17
— 180 C.E: Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius dies.
March 18
— 1837: Future president Grover Cleveland is born in Caldwell, New Jersey.
March 19
— 1918: President Woodrow Wilson’s signs the Standard Time Act of 1918 which establishes time zones in the United States.
March 20
— 2003: United States and coalition ground forces invade Iraq.
March 21
— 1963: Alcatraz prison closes.
March 22
— 1765: British Parliament passes the Stamp Act, a tax on all materials printed for commercial and legal matters in the American colonies. This is the beginning of a series of tax laws which raises cries of “taxation without representation” and, eventually, the American Revolution.
March 23
— 1775: In a speech in front of a Virginia convention, Patrick Henry states: “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
March 24
— 1765: British Parliament passes the Quartering Act, requiring colonists to provide temporary housing to British soldiers. To prevent such intrusions by any government in the future, the Third Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:
“No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”
March 25
— 1911: Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire kills 146 workers, primarily girls and young women, in New York City. The calamity leads to safety regulations and laws for factory workers.
March 26
— 1953: Dr. Jonas Salk announces on a radio broadcast that he has developed a vaccine which eventually leads to the elimination of the scourge of polio. Vaccine tests on large scale begin in April 1954.
March 27
— 1964: Most powerful earthquake in the history of the U.S. occurs in the Prince William Sound region of Alaska. The earthquake is measured at 9.2 on the Richter scale and lasts approximately four and a half minutes. It is the second largest earthquake ever recorded in the world after a 9.5 earthquake in Chile in 1960.
March 28
— 1979: The worst nuclear accident in US history occurs at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
— 1969: Former president Dwight D. Eisenhower dies in Washington D.C.
March 29
— 1790: Future president John Tyler is born in Charles City County, Virginia.
March 30
— 1981: President Ronald Reagan is shot after leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington D.C. by John Hinckley Jr. After surgery, Reagan survives. Hinckley shot Reagan to win the affection of actress Jodie Foster.
March 31
— 1889: The Eiffel Tower opens in Paris, France, becoming the tallest man-made structure in the world (a title it would hold until 1930 with the opening of the Chrysler Building in New York City).
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April
April 1
— 1945: U.S. troops invaded the Japanese island of Okinawa (the last seaborn invasion of World War II). Over 1,300 U.S. Navy ships approached the island, landing more than 60,000 soldiers and Marines — more than 12,000 lost their lives during the battle which lasted until June 22, 1945. It is estimated that the Japanese lost approximately 100,000 dead, including many who committed suicide. The high casualty rate in the battle of Okinawa was one of the factors President Harry Truman considered when deciding whether to utilize the atomic bombs on Japan.
April 2
— 1865: Jefferson Davis and his cabinet abandoned the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. It was the beginning of the end for the Confederacy.
April 3
— 1882: Jesse James was shot and killed in his own home in St. Joseph, Missouri, by Robert Ford, a member of his own outlaw gang.
April 4
— 1968: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee by James Earl Ray. Ray’s bullet killed not only a man, but the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans, of all races.
— 1841: President William Henry Harrison died after only one month (31 days) in office. People used to believe that he got sick because he gave a very long inaugural address without a hat, overcoat, or gloves. The official cause of death was listed as pneumonia. However, some doctors now believe Harrison probably died from typhoid or paratyphoid fever (also known as enteric fever). Medical professionals base this theory on the symptoms of gastrointestinal problems that Harrison was exhibiting. Washington D.C. was disgusting and extremely unsanitary in 1841. The U.S. capital had no sewer system. Sewage was dumped anywhere and everywhere and got into the groundwater and rivers. This resulted in a breeding ground for bacteria, including salmonella. These conditions might also have led to the death in office of President Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850. When Harrison died, John Tyler became the first vice president to become president upon the death of his predecessor. On a lighter note, Harrison had the nickname of “Old Tippecanoe”. That is why Harrison and Tyler had possibly the most famous campaign slogan in American history: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”.
April 5
— 1951: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for spying on the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union. They were executed on June 19, 1953.
April 6
— 1917: U.S. declared war on Germany, joining the Allies in World War I.
— 1862: Battle of Shiloh began in Southwestern Tennessee between the Union army commanded by U.S. Grant and the Confederate army commanded by Albert Sidney Johnston. The battle ended the following day.
April 7
— 1948: World Health Organization (an agency of the United Nations) was formally created.
— 1954: President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a news conference wherein he referred to the imminent fall of French Indochina as: “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So, you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.” That is the domino theory of communism.
April 8
— 1904: France and the United Kingdom signed the Entente Cordiale, a series of agreements resolving various colonial disputes, resulting in closer relations between the two countries.
— 1973: Pablo Picasso died in Mougins, France.
— 1920: Venus de Milo (believed to have been carved approximately 150 BCE) was discovered on the Greek island of Melos.
— 1913: 17th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. This meant that U.S. senators are now elected by popular vote instead of by the state legislatures.
April 9
— 1865: Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate troops known as the Army of Northern Virginia to Union troops commanded by Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Although there were other Confederate troops still at large, this effectively ended the U.S. Civil War.
April 10
— 1919: Emiliano Zapata, revolutionary leader, was shot and killed in Morelos México.
April 11
— 1968: President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It expanded on previous laws and prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, sex, and family status. Title VIII of the Act is known as the Fair Housing Act (of 1968).
April 12
— 1861: Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in the middle of Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. This began the U.S. Civil War.
— 1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia. His vice president, Harry S. Truman, became president.
— 1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel to outer space, as well as the first person to orbit the Earth. This was a milestone in the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
April 13
— 1743: Future president (and primary author of the Declaration of Independence) Thomas Jefferson was born in the British colony of Virginia.
April 14
— 1865: Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater, Washington D.C.
— 1912: RMS Titanic, a British ocean liner, struck an iceberg. After midnight on April 15 the Titanic sank resulting in more than 1,500 deaths.
April 15
— 1865: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 AM in the Petersen House, a boarding house located across the street from Ford’s Theater where Lincoln had been shot the night before. His vice president, Andrew Johnson, became president.
— 1947: Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, ending the disgrace of segregation in major league baseball.
April 16
— 2007: In one of the worst of the many, many mass shootings in U.S. history, a student at Virginia Tech University, shot and killed 32 students and faculty members on the Virginia Tech campus.
April 17
— 1961: Bay of Pigs invasion. U.S. backed guerrillas invaded Cuba in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. The invasion failed miserably.
— 1975: The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, essentially ending the Cambodian Civil War. The horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime began.
— 1861: Virginia was the eighth state to secede from the Union.
— 1790: Benjamin Franklin died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
April 18
— 1775: Paul Revere and William Dawes rode from Boston to alert colonial revolutionaries that British troops were on their way to Lexington and Concord to seize weapons and to arrest John Hancock and Samuel Adams.
— 1942: Doolittle Raid. Sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers were launched from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet to bomb Tokyo and other cities in Japan.
— 1906: San Francisco earthquake, estimated magnitude 7.9 on the Richter scale, killed an estimated 3,000 people. Starting at 5:12 AM the earth shook for 45 to 60 seconds. The earthquake and the resulting fires destroyed much of the city.
April 19
— 1775: American Revolution began with battles at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts.
— 1995: Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma was heavily damaged as a truck full of agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other chemicals exploded. 168 people were killed. This was domestic terrorism by Americans who hated the Federal government.
April 20
— 1999: Columbine High School massacre. In Littleton, Colorado, 2 high school students murdered 12 students and 1 teacher. Since this was the first of this type of mass shooting, it commanded national attention and outrage. Unfortunately, these mass shootings, especially at schools, have become common place in the U.S.
April 21
— 1918: Manfred von Richthofen, the World War I German flying ace known as the “Red Baron”, was killed by Allied fire over the Somme valley in France. He was only 25 years old. During his legendary career, the Red Baron shot down 80 Allied planes.
April 22
— 1970: First Earth Day was celebrated.
— 1994: Former president Richard Nixon died in New York City.
April 23
— 1791: Future president James Buchanan was born in Cove Gap, Pennsylvania. Buchanan is the only president that was never married. Some have speculated that he may have been gay. Nobody really knows. There is no conclusive evidence one way or the other. But there is evidence that he was a terrible president who did nothing while seven states seceded from the union. He simply left it to Abraham Lincoln to deal with the impending civil war.
April 24
— 1916: Easter Rising began in Dublin, Ireland. Irish nationalists proclaimed the creation of the Irish Republic, independent of the United Kingdom. British troops brutally crushed the Irish nationalists with hundreds dead and approximately 2,000 injured.
April 25
— 1898: United States declared war on Spain.
April 26
— 1986: Explosion and fire occurred at Unit 4 of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl, Ukraine (at that time part of the USSR), releasing massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment.
April 27
— 1822: Future president, and the general who won the American Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio.
April 28
— 1788: Maryland was the seventh state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
— 1758: Future president James Monroe was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia.
April 29
— 1992: Rodney King Riots. Los Angeles erupted when four L.A. policeman were acquitted of the savage beating of Rodney King even though the beating was captured on video. After five days of rioting, 63 people were dead, over 2,300 injured, over 12,000 arrested, and property damage was estimated to be over $1 billion.
April 30
— 1789: George Washington was inaugurated as the first U.S. president at Federal Hall in New York City.
— 1945: Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker as the Red Army was conquering Berlin.
— 1812: Louisiana was admitted as the 18th state.
— 1975: Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to the Army of North Vietnam, effectively ending the Vietnam War.
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May
May 1
— 1931: Empire State Building opened and became the tallest building in the world. It retained that title until the completion of the World Trade Center in 1973.
May 2
— 2011: Osama Bin Laden killed by U.S. Navy Seals in Pakistan.
— 1972: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died.
May 3
— 1469: Niccolo Machiavelli, author of The Prince (Il Principe), was born in Florence, Italy (400 years before Italy was united as a country).
May 4
— 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a group of students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University, killing 4 students, wounding 9 (1 permanently paralyzed).
May 5
— 1862: Mexican forces defeated the French at the Battle of Puebla. This is the basis for the holiday known as Cinco de Mayo. Contrary to popular belief, Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day (which is actually September 16).
— 1821: Napoleon Bonaparte died on the island of St. Helena.
— 1961: Alan Shepard became the second person, and the first American, to go into outer space aboard “Freedom 7”. He was the first of the Mercury 7 astronauts.
May 6
— 1937: German zeppelin Hindenburg burst into flames as it attempted to dock in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Sadly, 35 passengers and crewmen died but, amazingly, 62 people survived.
— 1861: Arkansas became the 9th state to secede from the Union.
May 7
— 1915: RMS Lusitania (a British ocean liner) was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat. This was one of the first steps which lead the U.S. to enter World War I.
— 1954: Dien Bien Phu fell when the French surrendered to the Vietnamese. It marked the end of French colonial rule in Vietnam and lead to the partition of the country into North Vietnam and South Vietnam and continued conflict until 1975.
May 8
— 1884: Future president Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri.
— 1945: VE Day (Victory in Europe Day), the end of World War II in Europe. Nazi Germany actually surrendered on May 7, but the day of celebration was set for May 8. However, the war in the Pacific against Japan continued and would not end until the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan and the USSR entered the war against Japan.
May 9
— 1800: John Brown was born in Torrington, Connecticut. He became famous for leading a raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in an effort to start a slave rebellion. On October 16, 1859, John Brown led 18 men (13 Whites and 5 Blacks) into Harpers Ferry. They seized the arsenal with the hope that local slaves would join the raiders to be armed and then spread throughout Virginia. It was a complete failure. On December 2, 1859, Brown was hanged in Charles Town, Virginia (now part of West Virginia). He had written a note in his cell which read in part: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”
May 10
— 1940: Case Yellow: Nazi Germany began its invasion of France and the low countries. Although they were outnumbered by the French and British forces, the Germans quickly defeated the Allies and France surrendered on June 22, 1940.
— 1865: Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured in Irwin County, Georgia.
— 1869: Transcontinental railroad was completed when the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, Leland Stanford, ceremonially drove in the golden spike at Promontory Summit in Utah. Sixteen years later, that same man founded Stanford University.
May 11
— 1858: Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd state.
— 1862: During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederates blew up their own ironclad ship Merrimack, a.k.a. CSS Virginia. Federal troops were about to capture Gosport Naval Yard and all of the surrounding area. Confederates believed the only viable option was to destroy the ship to keep it from falling into the control of the Union Navy.
May 12
— 1949: USSR ended the blockade of West Berlin. Starting on June 24, 1948, the Soviets prevented any land entrance into West Berlin. The Western Allies responded with “Operation Vittles”, commonly known as the Berlin Airlift, whereby the Americans and British delivered by air all food and supplies needed for the approximately 2 million inhabitants of West Berlin.
May 13
— 1846: U.S. declared war on Mexico. The war was instigated by President James K. Polk so the U.S. could acquire California and most of northern Mexico.
May 14
— 1804: Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery started their expedition from St. Louis, Missouri to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and the Pacific Northwest.
May 15
— 1905: Las Vegas was founded in southern Nevada.
May 16
— 1966: The Cultural Revolution began in China. It lasted until 1976 (after the death of Mao) resulting in a great loss of life (estimates range from 500,000 to 2 million deaths).
May 17
— 1954: U.S. Supreme Court announced its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ruling racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The decision overturned the horrendous 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that stated “separate but equal” segregation was constitutional.
May 18
— 1980: Mount St. Helens (volcano) erupted in Skamania County, Washington, killing 57 people.
May 19
— 1536: Anne Boleyn, English King Henry VIII’s second wife, was beheaded.
— 1992: The 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was certified, prohibiting any law raising, or lowering, the salaries of members of Congress from taking effect before the start of a new session of Congress. It reads in total as follows: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.” This amendment had been proposed by Congress in 1789 but it was not ratified by the requisite number (three-fourths) of states until 1992.
May 20
— 1861: North Carolina became the 10th state to secede from the Union.
— 1506: Christopher Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain.
May 21
— 1927: Charles A. Lindbergh landed his plane (The Spirit of St. Louis) in Paris, successfully completing the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight. This made Lindbergh an international celebrity and an American hero. However, his image was tarnished in October 1938, when Lindbergh accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Herman Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe and the number two man in Nazi Germany behind Adolf Hitler.
— 1881: American Red Cross was founded by Clara Barton.
May 22
— 1906: The Wright brothers were granted a patent for their “Flying-Machine”. Orville and Wilbur Wright are credited with making the first controlled, sustained flight of an engine powered heavier-than-air aircraft. That occurred on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
May 23
— 1934: Bonnie and Clyde (Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow) were shot to death by police outside Sailes, Louisiana.
— 1788: South Carolina became the 8th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
May 24
— 1883: Brooklyn Bridge opened, connecting the then separate “Twin Cities” of New York and Brooklyn. The five boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island did not consolidate into one city in 1898.
May 25
— 1787: Constitutional Convention began in Philadelphia with George Washington presiding. The convention had been called to revise the Articles of Confederation. But during the summer the delegates drafted an entirely new framework of government. They signed the new Constitution on September 17, 1787, and sent it to the states for ratification.
— 1961: President John Kennedy asked Congress for an additional $7 billion to $9 billion for the space program, stating that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the earth.” This incredibly ambitious goal would be reached when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon on July 20, 1969.
May 26
— 1868: President Andrew Johnson was the first U.S. president to be impeached. However, on this date, he was acquitted (by 1 vote) in the Senate impeachment trial. Thus, he remained in office.
May 27
— 1941: The German battleship Bismarck was sunk by the British navy in North Atlantic.
— 1942: Operation Anthropoid. Czech resistance operatives Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš attempted to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich (the Nazi Chief of Security Police and SD) in Prague. Heydrich road in a convertible with the top down and took the same route to work each day. The assassination was planned at a curve in the road so Heydrich’s car would slow down. As the car slowed, Gabčík stepped out in front of the car with a machine gun, but it jammed. Kubiš threw a grenade that struck the side of the car, severely injuring Heydrich. The Nazi leader died on June 4, 1942. Heydrich was one of the primary architects of the “Final Solution”, the Nazi plan to murder all of the Jews in Europe.
May 28
— 1830: President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, leading to the forced relocation of approximately 60,000 Native Americans to “Indian Territory” (present-day Oklahoma). During the forced march, known as the Trail of Tears, approximately 4,000 to 6,000 died.
May 29
— 1453: The Ottomans captured Constantinople. This ended the Byzantine Empire (although the people of Constantinople considered themselves the Eastern Roman Empire). The Ottomans changed the name of Constantinople to Istanbul.
— 1953: Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mt. Everest, the highest point on Earth.
— 1848: Wisconsin was admitted as the 30th state.
— 1917: Future president John F. Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts.
May 30
— 1431: Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy at Rouen, France. Historians believe she was only 19 years old. She fought on behalf of France against the English in the Hundred Years’ War. In 1920 she was canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.
May 31
— 1921: Tulsa Race Massacre began as a large white mob attacked the Black section of Tulsa. The racist mob killed hundreds and destroyed many homes and businesses.
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June
June 1
— 1792: Kentucky was admitted as 15th state.
— 1796: Tennessee was admitted as 16th state.
— 1868: Former president James Buchanan died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
June 2
— 1953: Queen Elizabeth II was formally crowned as queen of the United Kingdom.
June 3
— 1965: First American spacewalk as astronaut Ed White left his Gemini 4 capsule for approximately 20 minutes.
June 4
— 1989: Tiananmen Square Massacre. Chinese troops and tanks brutally crushed pro-democracy protesters in central Beijing. Exact figures are unknown but estimates are several thousands killed and up to 10,000 arrested.
June 5
— 1968: Robert Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died the next day.
— 2004: Former president Ronald Reagan died in Los Angeles, California.
June 6
— 1944: D-Day. The Allies, primarily American, British, and Canadian forces, invaded Nazi occupied Europe in the Normandy region of France. It was the largest amphibious invasion in history. This was the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.
June 7
— 1913: Lead by Hudson Stuck, the first people reached the summit of Denali (known as Mt. McKinley from 1917 to 2015), the highest point in North America.
— 1494: Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the world into 2 spheres of influence. The eastern half belonged to Portugal and the western half belonged to Spain. This was more than 23 years before the big event of October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the church at Wittenberg, Germany. That meant that the Treaty of Tordesillas occurred before the Protestant Reformation, meaning this was still a time when the Pope had great influence over all the kings of Europe. It was the Pope that divided the world in half between the Spanish and the Portuguese. In a conference between the Spanish and Portuguese in the town of Tordesillas, Spain, a straight, vertical line was drawn on the map from north to south. All lands “discovered” east of that line belonged to Portugal and all lands “discovered” west of that line belonged to Spain. The line of demarcation was eventually set at 46 degrees, 37 minutes west of the prime meridian of Greenwich, England, essentially going through modern day Sao Paolo, Brazil. The Treaty of Tordesillas is the reason why just about all of the countries south of the United States in the Western Hemisphere speak Spanish, except for Brazil, which speaks Portuguese.
June 8
— 1968: James Earl Ray (who assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr in Memphis on April 4, 1968) was arrested in London, England.
— 1861: Tennessee was the 11th state to secede from the Union. It was the last state to join the Confederacy.
— 1845: Former president Andrew Jackson died in Nashville, Tennessee.
June 9
— 1893: The interior of Ford’s Theatre collapsed, killing 22 people. This was the site where John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865. In 1866 the federal government purchased the theater and converted it into an office building. The site became a Lincoln museum in 1932. In 1968 it was reopened as a theater and today appears as it did on the night of Lincoln’s assassination.
June 10
— 1692: The first person to be hanged for witchcraft in Salem was Bridget Bishop. Contrary to popular belief, in 1600s New England they hanged people for being a witch, they did not burn them. When we think of hanging as a form of execution, we think of the somewhat sophisticated manner they used in the 1800s where the condemned person had a noose placed around their neck and then a trap door opened and they fell. Most of the times the fall would snap their neck and kill them fairly quickly. But the hangings in the 1600s in New England were much worse. The nooses were just hung from a very sturdy tree branch. A ladder was placed against the branch and the condemned person climbed up the ladder and had the noose placed around their neck. They were then simply pushed off the ladder. There was not enough force to snap the person’s neck so they slowly twisted and were strangled to death. This was a much slower process and a very gruesome way to die. As a result of the Salem witch trials, 19 people were hanged as witches; one man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death under rocks for refusing to enter a plea; and 5 people died in jail from living in the appalling conditions. So, there were a total of 25 who died from this mass hysteria.
June 11
— 1963: The University of Alabama was integrated with the registration of two African-American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, accompanied by federal marshals and the Alabama National Guard. Integration of schools resulted from the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. That case ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The decision overturned the horrendous 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that stated “separate but equal” segregation was constitutional.
June 12
— 1963: Civil rights leader Medgar Evans was shot and killed outside of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
— 2016: A maniac shot and killed 49 people in the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in an anti-gay hate crime.
— 1924: Future president George H. W. Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts.
— 1987: President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech in West Berlin wherein he famously said: “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall”.
June 13
— 1966: The U.S. Supreme Court delivered its decision in Miranda v. Arizona, establishing the famous “Miranda rights” which are usually stated: “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”
— 1967: President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated the first black person to the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall.
— 1983: Pioneer 10 became the first human made object to leave our solar system when it passed the orbit of Neptune, the outermost planet. It had been launched on March 2, 1972 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
— 1971: The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a 47 volume study by the U.S. Defense Department regarding the Vietnam War.
June 14
— 1777: The Continental Congress adopted the first official American flag with 13 alternating red and white stripes and a navy blue canton with 13 white stars. This resolution stated: “Resolved, that the flag of the United States shall be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be 13 stars white in a blue field representing a new constellation.” In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation establishing a national Flag Day on June 14.
— 1940: The German army occupied Paris in World War II.
June 15
— 1215: English King John affixed his seal to the Magna Carta at Runnymede, England.
— 1836: Arkansas was admitted as the 25th state.
— 1846: U.S. and Britain signed the Oregon Treaty, ending 28 years of joint occupancy of the “Oregon Country”. Pursuant to this treaty, the border between the U.S. and Canada was continued along the 49th parallel to the Strait of Georgia which separates current British Columbia from Vancouver Island. As part of the deal, all of Vancouver Island was given to British Canada.
— 1849: Former president James K. Polk died in Nashville, Tennessee. He had the shortest retirement of any president (103 days).
June 16
— 1858: In Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln was named the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, and delivered one of his most famous speeches which included: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” At the time state legislatures selected senators. That would not change until April 8, 1913, when the 17th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified changing the election of U.S. senators to popular vote of the people of that state instead of by the state legislature. Lincoln was not elected senator. But two years later, he was elected president, and went on to end slavery and save the Union of the United States.
June 17
— 1775: Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The battle actually took place on Breed’s Hill. Although technically a British victory, their casualties were so high that British General Clinton remarked: “A few more such victories would have shortly put an end to British dominion in America.”
— 1991: Former President Zachary Taylor’s body was exhumed from his grave in Kentucky. Conspiracy theorist, Clara Rising, a humanities professor at the University of Florida, had convinced Zachary Taylor’s descendants that President Taylor had been murdered by arsenic poisoning because of his opposition to the expansion of slavery. The medical examination of the President’s remains proved that Taylor died of natural causes and was NOT murdered.
— 1972: Five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building in Washington D.C. The scandal which arose eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon on August 8, 1974 (effective on noon the next day).
June 18
— 1815: Battle of Waterloo, at the time in the Netherlands, now located in Belgium (Belgium did not become an independent country until 1830). Napoleon Bonaparte suffered his final defeat.
June 19
— 1865: Juneteenth. Federal soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and informed the enslaved people there that the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished throughout the U.S.
June 20
— 1863: In the midst of the Civil War, West Virginia was admitted as the 35th state. When Virginia seceded from the Union on April 17, 1861, residents of 46 counties in western Virginia voted to remain in the U.S. and to form a separate state.
June 21
— 1788: New Hampshire became the 9th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. This was significant because Article VII of the Constitution reads as follows: “The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.” Ever since this date, the U.S. Constitution has been the supreme law of the United States.
June 22
— 1941: Operation Barbarossa. The two worst regimes in history went to war. Nazi Germany invaded Stalinist U.S.S.R. In the largest invasion ever, approximately 3 million Germans, along with approximately 700,000 German allied troops, swarmed into the Soviet Union. By the time the war in Europe was over in May 1945, an estimated 30 million people died on the Eastern Front of WWII.
— 1969: The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire. This happened several times in the past. The 1969 Cuyahoga River fire inspired the U.S. Congress to pass the National Environmental Policy Act which created the Environmental Protection Agency.
— 1633: Galileo Galilei was found guilty of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church for failing to acknowledge the church’s position that the sun revolved around the earth.
June 23
— 1940: Hitler visited Paris. The day before, French and German representatives signed an armistice ending the war between France and Nazi Germany. Paris was occupied by the Wehrmacht (the German army) and Hitler seized upon his opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream to visit the City of Light. Hitler was accompanied by his architect, Albert Speer, along with various aides and bodyguards. They were only in Paris for several hours. Hitler visited the Paris Opera House, the Arc de Triomphe, the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur. He was able to view the Eiffel Tower but the Nazi leader could not go to the top of it because the French had severed the cables for the elevators. Hitler greatly admired Paris and wanted Berlin rebuilt to surpass the French capital. However, when the Americans, British, and Canadians were getting close to Paris in August 1944, Hitler ordered that Paris be destroyed. Fortunately, German General Dietrich von Choltitz refused to carry out Hitler’s orders and turned over an intact Paris. Note: for decades there has been an ongoing dispute about the date of Hitler’s only visit to Paris. Apparently this arose from Albert Speer listing the date as June 28, 1940 in his book “Inside the Third Reich”. However, most other first-person sources from people who were present on the Paris visit list the date as June 23, 1940.
June 24
— 1862 Former president Martin Van Buren died in Kinderhook, New York. He was the first president born as an American citizen and not a subject of the British crown. His nickname of “Old Kinderhook” became shortened to “OK”. In 1840 his supporters liked to say that “Martin Van Buren is OK”. This was the start of the American idiom “OK”. There are various purported origins for the term “OK” from before 1840. But the nickname for Martin Van Buren as Old Kinderhook popularized that term “OK” and made it become part of common American language.
— 1908: Former president Grover Cleveland died in Princeton, New Jersey.
June 25
— 1876: Battle of the Little Bighorn. The U.S. Seventh Calvary, led by Colonel George Armstrong Custer, was completely annihilated by Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors.
— 1788: Virginia was the 10th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
— 1950: The Korean War began as North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel (the Demilitarized Zone) into South Korea.
June 26
— 2015: The United States Supreme Court announced its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, ruling that same-sex marriage cannot be banned and that all same-sex marriages must be recognized throughout the U.S.
June 27
— 1542: Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo set sail with three ships on behalf of the Spanish crown. The ships left from the port of Navidad on the Pacific Coast of modern day Mexico which had been conquered by the Spanish two decades earlier. The purpose of this voyage was to explore the West Coast of North America. It is believed that Cabrillo and his crew were the first Europeans to visit what is now California.
June 28
— 1919: Treaty of Versailles was signed in Paris, officially ending World War I.
— 1969: Stonewall uprising. The start of the gay rights movement occured when patrons of the Stonewall Inn resisted the police raid targeting the gay nightclub.
— 1836: Former president James Madison died in Orange County, Virginia.
— 1914: Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot and killed by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo (currently in Bosnia and Herzegovina), which eventually triggered World War I.
June 29
— 2007: Apple released the first iPhone.
— 1956: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. This established the enormous interstate highway system in the United States.
June 30
— 1934: Night of the Long Knives. Adolf Hitler purged possible rivals in the Nazi Party by having at least 85 executed.
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July
July 1
— 1867: Canada Day. The independent Dominion of Canada was officially recognized by the United Kingdom.
— 1863: First day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the largest battle (by casualties) ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.
— 1916: World War I Battle of the Somme began. The battle lasted 140 days until November 18, 1916, with massive casualties: (approximates) 420,000 British, 200,000 French, and 435,000 German.
— 1997: Political control of Hong Kong was transferred from the United Kingdom to China.
— 1971: The 26th Amendment was ratified, lowering the voting age for all federal, state, and local elections in the United States to 18 years old.
July 2
— 1881: President James A. Garfield was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C. by Charles J. Guiteau. As a result, Garfield died on September 19, 1881.
— 1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The law prohibits racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, unequal application of voter registration requirements, and employment discrimination.
— 1863: Second day of the Battle of Gettysburg.
— 1937: American pilot Amelia Earhart (and navigator Frederick Noonan) disappeared in the Pacific during an attempted flight around the world. She and her plane have never been found.
July 3
— 1890: Idaho was admitted as the 43rd state.
— 1863: Third (and final) day of the Battle of Gettysburg, most famous for Pickett’s charge. It results in a resounding Union victory.
July 4
— 1776: United States declared its independence from Britain with the formal adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
— 1826: On the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, two former presidents who drafted the Declaration died hours apart. John Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson died in Albemarle County, Virginia.
— 1831: Exactly 5 years after Adams and Jefferson, former president James Monroe died in New York City.
— 1863: Confederate army in Vicksburg, Mississippi surrendered to the Federal army commanded by Ulysses S. Grant. This gave federal forces complete control of the Mississippi River.
— 1872: Future president Calvin Coolidge was born in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. He is the only president to be born on Independence Day.
July 5
— 1687 Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), usually just referred to as Principia, was first published in England. This incredible work outlined Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation.
July 6
— 1946: Future president George W. Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the only president born in Connecticut.
— 1348: Pope Clement VI issued a Papal Bull which condemned the violence against Jews. During the Black Death, many Jews were severely persecuted on the claims that they were poisoning wells throughout Europe, causing the plague. The Black Death was essentially a form of bubonic plague that devastated Europe between1347 and 1351. Estimates range between 30 to 60% of the population of Europe died during the Black Death. The Papal Bull pointed out the obvious that Jews were also dying from the Black Death, and they certainly were not causing the plague. Pope Clement VI was in Avignon, France. From 1309 to 1377 the papacy was headquartered in Avignon instead of Rome.
July 7
— 1898: U.S. annexed Hawaii when President William McKinley signed a joint resolution of Congress. Hawaii remained a territory of the United States until August 21, 1959, when Hawaii became the 50th state. The Flag Act of 1818 set the standard for the U.S. flag — the modern rule of having 13 red and white stripes representing the 13 original states and the number of stars match the current number of states. Every time a new state joined the union a star was added to the flag on the following Fourth of July. Starting on July 4, 1912, the American flag had 48 stars (you see those flags in World War II movies). The last two states, Alaska and Hawaii, both joined in 1959. However, Alaska was admitted as a state on January 3, 1959, and Hawaii not until August 21, 1959. This meant that a star was added on July 4, 1959, representing Alaska, but the 50th star was not added until July 4, 1960, representing Hawaii. So, for one year from July 1959 until July 1960 the U.S. had a 49-star flag (they are pretty rare). Those flags had 7 rows of 7 stars, but they were not in orderly columns, the even numbered rows were a little indented compared to the odd numbered rows. The present 50-star flag has existed since July 4, 1960.
July 8
— 1853: Four U.S. Navy ships, commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry, sailed into Tokyo Bay. After Perry threatened to open fire on Tokyo, Japanese officials met with the American commander. This is considered the (forced) opening of Japan to Western nations after two centuries of self-imposed isolation. In the 1500s and early 1600s, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch traders engaged in some trade with Japan. However, in 1639, the Japanese expelled most foreigners due to attempts by the Europeans to convert the Japanese to Christianity and the European’s unfair trading practices.
July 9
— 1762: Catherine the Great was proclaimed empress and the sole ruler of Russia.
— 1850: President Zachary Taylor died in office in Washington D.C., probably from gastroenteritis. His vice president, Millard Fillmore, became president. On June 17, 1991, Zachary Taylor’s body was exhumed from his grave in Kentucky. Conspiracy theorist, Clara Rising, a humanities professor at the University of Florida, had convinced Zachary Taylor’s descendants that President Taylor had been murdered by arsenic poisoning because of his opposition to the expansion of slavery. The medical examination of the President’s remains proved that Taylor died of natural causes and was NOT murdered.
July 10
— 1925: Scopes Monkey Trial began in Dayton, Tennessee. Teacher John Scopes was tried for violating Tennessee state law by teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in a public high school.
— 1940: Battle of Britain commenced by Nazi Germany. The Luftwaffe (German air force) attacked British supply convoys in the English Channel for the first time. The Battle of Britain continued through October 1940.
— 1890: Wyoming wasadmitted as the 44th state.
July 11
— 1804: Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton died the following day in New York City.
— 1979: Skylab, the first space station of the U.S., crashed to Earth 5 years after the last mission aboard the vessel.
— 1767: Future president John Quincy Adams was born in Quincy, Massachusetts.
July 12
— 1984: First woman nominated for national office: Geraldine Ferraro was named the Vice Presidential candidate by the Democrats.
— 1979: Disco Demolition Night. A promotion at the home of the White Sox, Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois, turned into a riot after a crate of disco records was blown up on the field between games of a doubleheader.
July 13
— 100 BCE: Julius Caesar was born in Rome. The exact date is unknown, but it is believed to be July 13 or 12. We know he was born in July. The month of July is named after him. We are sure of his date of death: March 15, 44 BCE (the Ides of March), when Caesar was murdered by many members of the Roman Senate.
— 1787: The Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, establishing a government for the Northwest Territory, outlining the process for admitting new states to the Union, and guaranteeing that newly created states would be equal to the original 13 states. Most importantly, the ordinance prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, which would later become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
July 14
— 1789: Storming of the Bastille. Revolutionaries seized control of the political prison in Paris. This is considered the beginning of the French Revolution.
— 1913: Future president Gerald Ford (born Leslie Lynch King, Jr.) was born in Omaha, Nebraska.
July 15
— 1799: Rosetta Stone was found by a French soldier during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. Note: the exact date of discovery is debated. It was called the Rosetta Stone because it was found at the city of Rosetta (modern el Rashid), Egypt. When the British defeated the French in Egypt during the Napoleonic wars the British took possession of the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone is a broken part of a larger stone slab. It contains writings in three languages: ancient Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and a cursive Egyptian script called “demotic”. Before this time nobody was able to translate hieroglyphs. It was not until September 27, 1822, that a French scholar named Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic code, using the Rosetta Stone. It is currently located in the British Museum in London.
July 16
— 1945: First atomic bomb was exploded. The codename for the nuclear test was “Trinity”. The test occurred at the bombing range near Alamogordo Army Airfield in New Mexico. The plutonium-based test weapon was nicknamed “the gadget”. The test was a complete success. The world had entered the atomic age. Among the many observers of the Trinity test were Enrico Fermi, General Leslie Groves, and Robert Oppenheimer, the mastermind of the project. Oppenheimer later recalled that the explosion made him think of a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The gravity of the situation was not lost on Oppenheimer or, presumably, any of the other people who witnessed the giant mushroom cloud in New Mexico.
July 17
— 2020: Civil rights activist John Lewis died in Atlanta, Georgia. Lewis was a co-founder and chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He also led and helped organize many of the critical events in the Civil Rights movement, such as the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. He was also influential in the Freedom Rides of 1961. White and Black student activists rode buses throughout the Southern States to protest segregation on interstate buses and bus terminals.
— 1936: Spanish Civil War began.
July 18
— 64 CE: The Great Fire of Rome began, and lasted for six days, destroying much of Rome. The famous story of Emperor Nero starting the fire and playing the lyre as he watched the fire is almost certainly false. Tacitus, a reliable historian from ancient Rome who wrote about the fire approximately 60 years later, stated that Nero was not even in Rome when the fire started, and that when he returned he provided help to those who lost their homes. The fire probably started in merchant shops near the Circus Maximus (stadium for chariot racing) and quickly spread throughout the tightly packed city. Estimates of the city’s population at that time range from 500,000 to a million people. Emperor Nero blamed the fire on the new religious group of Christians.
July 19
— 1848: Seneca Falls Convention began. For 2 days, July 19-20, 1848, the first large women’s rights conference occurred. It is usually called the Seneca Falls Convention because it occurred in Seneca Falls, New York. It was organized by several women, but the 2 leaders were Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Approximately 300 people attended, mostly women but some men also. Elizabeth Cady Stanton started the two-day convention by announcing the goals and purposes of the conference: “We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed—to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love.” They drafted a set of 11 resolutions for equal rights for women. Ten of the resolutions were approved unanimously. Only the 9th resolution was approved with just a majority. And what was the 9th resolution? It called for women’s suffrage.
July 20
— 1969: Apollo 11 landed at Tranquility Base. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. Michael Collins orbited in the command module above the moon. On July 20, 1969, at 10:56 p.m. EDT, Neil Armstrong took the first step on the moon. More than a billion people throughout the earth were watching and listening to the first words said on the moon. There is a question about exactly what he said. Armstrong later claimed he said: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” But what was heard was “one small step for man” not “one small step for a man”. It makes a difference. Without the indefinite article “a”, if he just said “that’s one small step for man” that is synonymous with saying mankind. By including the article “a” he is referring to an individual, himself. That latter definition is what he meant; that one particular man was taking a small step but all of mankind was taking a giant leap. Armstrong always claimed that he said “a man”. When you listen to the audio you cannot hear it. Some experts claim that there was just a blip in the audio transmission from the moon to the earth. Who knows? Either way it was one of the greatest moments in history.
— 1944: Operation Valkyrie. German officer Claus von Stauffenberg detonated a bomb inside of the “Wolf’s Lair” field headquarters in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Stauffenberg placed his briefcase containing the bomb underneath the conference table. He left shortly after. During the meeting, Colonel Heinz Brandt apparently kicked the briefcase. So, he moved it to the other side of the thick, solid oak table leg. It is believed that, when the bomb detonated, the table leg shielded Hitler from the blast. Three officers and a stenographer died in the explosion. Unfortunately for the world, Hitler survived, leading to countless more lives to be lost in World War II.
July 21
— 1970: Aswan High Dam was completed across the Nile River in Aswan, Egypt. It was an enormous project which took over 10 years to build.
— 1899: Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois.
— 1861: The First Battle of Bull Run was fought near Manassas, Virginia. It was the first large-scale battle of the U.S. Civil War.
July 22
— 1934: Gangster John Dillinger, the original Public Enemy Number One, was shot and killed by federal agents outside of the Biograph Theater in Chicago, Illinois.
— 1795: Cleveland, Ohio was founded by General Moses Cleaveland. Of course he spelled the name of the city the same as his last name: “Cleaveland”. It is unclear how the spelling of the city name changed. There is a story that the “Cleveland Advertiser” newspaper dropped “a” because the name “Cleaveland” would not fit on the masthead for its first issue in 1831. Others claim that the “a” was dropped by accident (a simple misspelling) on early maps from the 1790s. When the city incorporated in 1836, they adopted the spelling of “Cleveland”.
July 23
— 1967: Detroit Riot began. The rioting continued for 5 days, resulting in 43 dead, over 300 injured, and nearly 1,400 buildings had been burned. This was the largest riot in the U.S. since the New York draft riots in 1863.
— 1885: Former president Ulysses S. Grant died in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. Contrary to a popular myth, author Mark Twain did not assist Grant in writing his memoirs. Grant wrote them himself. The transcript in Grant’s own handwriting still exists. However, Twain assisted Grant in getting a good deal from a publisher so Grant could provide for his family after he died. Grant finished writing the memoirs shortly before his death and Twain made sure they were published.
July 24
— 1974: U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon must surrender the Watergate tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor. This lead to Nixon leaving office 2 weeks later. On August 8, 1974, Nixon gave a televised speech announcing that he would resign the presidency at noon the following day, meaning August 9.
July 25
— 1978: First “test tube” baby was born in Manchester, England. Louise Joy Brown became the first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization.
— 1943: Benito Mussolini was amazingly voted out of office by the Italian Grand Council following the invasion of Sicily by Allied forces. Usually the only way to remove a dictator is violence. Mussolini was then placed under arrest.
July 26
— 1948: Segregation finally ended in the U.S. military by an executive order from President Harry S Truman.
— 1775: U.S. postal system was founded by the Second Continental Congress; Benjamin Franklin was named as postmaster general.
July 27
— 1974: Articles of Impeachment were adopted by the House Judiciary Committee against President Richard Nixon.
— 1953: Korean War essentially ended when the U.S., China, North Korea, and South Korea signed an armistice.
July 28
— 1794: During the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre was beheaded in the guillotine in Paris. Robespierre had been the leader of the “Reign of Terror”. That was a 10 month period (1793 to 1794) during the French Revolution when the Committee of Public Safety executed somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people. The guillotine was located in the Place de la Concorde, in central Paris. Today the Obelisk of Luxor (over 3,000 years old) stands where the guillotine was located during the French Revolution.
July 29
— 1958: NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) was created as a civilian agency to manage America’s exploration of space.
July 30
— 1965: As part of his Great Society, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law providing health insurance for elderly Americans.
July 31
— 1875: Former president Andrew Johnson died in Elizabethton, Tennessee. He was the first U.S. president to be impeached. However, he was not convicted in the Senate, so he served the remainder of his term.
— 1856 Christchurch, New Zealand, officially became a city by royal charter.
— 1498 Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover the island of Trinidad on his third voyage. After Spanish, and then British, colonial rule, Trinidad and Tobago became an independent country in 1962.
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August
August 1
— 1876: Colorado was admitted as the 38th state. Because of the year of admission, it is known as the Centennial State.
— 1936: Opening ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics. The most impressive innovation for the 1936 games was the Olympic torch relay. Carl Diem, a German Olympic organizer, came up with the idea of the torch relay after reading about the ancient Olympic games. He proposed it to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels who saw the publicity value. The Olympic flame was first used in modern games in 1928 at Amsterdam. Four years later, at the Los Angeles games, an Olympic torch was built into the peristyle end of the L.A. Coliseum. That torch is still there and is used at certain events. But, unfortunately, the Nazis invented the relay. Starting on July 20, 1936, a young Greek, Konstantin Kondylis, became the first runner in the history of the modern Olympic Torch Relay. He left Olympia, Greece with a lit torch and ran to a designated place where another runner held a torch which was lit by the flame of the torch carried by Konstantin Kondylis. This relay went on from runner to runner all the way from Greece to Berlin. The relay took 12 days and passed through 7 countries: Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany. This torch relay captured the imagination of the world, ending on August 1, 1936, during the opening ceremonies. It was very dramatic when Fritz Schilgen, a German athlete, entered the Olympic Stadium and ran to the far side, climbed the steps, waited a moment to build tension, and then dipped his torch into the cauldron which burst into flame. The 100,000 people in attendance went wild. That was a good start for the Berlin Olympics, but the amazing feats of a Black American named Jesse Owens are the primary memories of those games.
August 2
— 1943: PT-109 (patrol torpedo boat) commanded by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer in Blackett Strait near the Solomon Islands.
— 1923: President Warren G. Harding died in office in San Francisco, probably of cardiac arrest. His vice president, Calvin Coolidge, became president.
— 1876: Wild Bill Hickok was murdered in Deadwood, South Dakota.
— 1934: German president Paul von Hindenburg died, and chancellor Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany with the title “Fuhrer” (leader).
— 1939: Physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller drove out to Peconic, Long Island to meet with Albert Einstein. They showed Einstein a letter Szilard prepared to President Franklin Roosevelt. Szilard and Teller knew that for the president, or the people around him, to take the letter seriously it would have to be signed by the most famous scientist in the world. Einstein agreed and signed it. The main part of the letter advised the president that it might become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction by which vast amounts of power would be released. The letter also warned that Nazi Germany might be working on a nuclear chain reaction and might develop an atomic bomb. Essentially this letter started the Manhattan project, the program to build the first atomic weapons.
— 216 BCE: Battle of Cannae near the ancient village of Cannae in Apulia, Italy. Hannibal and his Carthaginians routed the Roman army in the worst defeat in Roman history.
August 3
— 1958: USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, completed the first undersea voyage to the North Pole.
— 1492: Christopher Columbus began his voyage across the Atlantic with three ships: the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, departing from Palos, Spain.
August 4
— 1944: Anne Frank and her family were captured by the Gestapo in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
— 1961: Future president Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
— 1892: The father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden were found brutally murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts home. Lizzie was later tried and acquitted of the crime.
August 5
— 1962: Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, California.
— 1864: Battle of Mobile Bay. During the American Civil War, a federal naval fleet commanded by Admiral David Farragut entered Mobile Bay, Alabama. The 18-ship federal squadron included wooden warships as well as 4 ironclad “monitors”. The confederate squadron included the heavy ironclad ram CSS Tennessee. The confederates also had 3 forts which guarded the entrance to the bay. The USS Tecumseh (an ironclad monitor) hit a torpedo (at that time underwater mines were called torpedoes). USS Tecumseh quickly sank. This caused the other federal ships to stop because the captains were afraid of hitting other torpedoes (underwater mines). This left the federal fleet exposed to fire from the confederate ships as well as the confederate forts. This is when Admiral Farragut supposedly gave his famous order: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” The federal forces were eventually victorious and gained control of Mobile Bay.
August 6
— 1945: U.S. B-29 bomber “Enola Gay” dropped an atomic (uranium) bomb named “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, Japan killing approximately 80,000 people in the blast (others would die later from radiation poisoning). Three days later, U.S. B-29 bomber “Bockscar” dropped an atomic (plutonium) bomb named “Fat Man” on Nagasaki, Japan.
August 7
— 1974: Philippe Petit walked on a tight rope between the top of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
— 1964: The U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing President Lyndon Johnson to take any measures he believed were necessary for the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia. This resolution gave LBJ the authority to conduct war in Vietnam.
— 1943: The crew of PT-157 recovered John F. Kennedy. The next day, Kennedy led the rescuers to retrieve the remaining crew members of PT-109 which had been cut in half and sunk six days earlier.
August 8
— 1974: President Richard Nixon announced his resignation, effective on noon the next day. He is the only U.S. president to resign.
August 9
— 1974: Gerald Ford became president at noon Eastern time when the resignation of Richard Nixon became effective. Ford is the only U.S. president who was never elected in a national election. He had been appointed vice president to fill the vacancy after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned from office on October 10, 1973, due to charges of income tax evasion and political corruption.
— 1945: U.S. B-29 bomber “Bockscar” dropped an atomic (plutonium) bomb named “Fat Man” on Nagasaki, Japan killing approximately 40,000 people in the blast (others would die later from radiation poisoning).
August 10
— 1793: The former royal palace known as the Louvre was opened as a public museum in Paris, France.
— 1821: Missouri was admitted as the 24th state.
— 1977: David Berkowitz, who nicknamed himself the “Son of Sam”, was arrested in New York City for murdering 6 people and wounding 7 others, starting in July 1976.
— 1874: Future president Herbert Hoover was born in West branch, Iowa.
— 1921: Franklin Delano Roosevelt contracted polio, most likely while swimming at Campobello Island (a small island which belongs to the Canadian province of New Brunswick). He was only 39 years old. The next day he discovered he could not walk and would never walk again. Eleven years later he was elected president of the United States.
August 11
— 1965: Watts Civil Unrest/Riot began in the Watts section of Los Angeles, California. The violence continued through August 16, leaving 34 dead, over 1,000 injured, and approximately 3,400 arrested.
August 12
— 1898: Spanish-American war essentially ended with the signing of the Peace Protocol between the U.S. and Spain. The Formal Treaty of Paris would not be signed until December 10, 1898.
August 13
— 1961: Berlin Wall began as East German soldiers installed barbed wire and cement blocks separating East Berlin from West Berlin. The temporary structure would be formalized into an actual wall shortly thereafter.
— 1521: Hernan Cortes and his Spanish army, after a siege of three months, finally captured the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (site of modern-day Mexico City).
August 14
— 1945: VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day) was celebrated as the Japanese announced that they surrendered, ending World War II. However, September 2 is officially considered VJ Day in the U.S. because that is when the Japanese actually signed the surrender document on board the USS Missouri.
— 1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security act into law.
— 1851: John Henry Holliday, known throughout history as Doc Holliday, was born on August 14, 1851, in Georgia. Everybody called him Doc because he was actually a dentist. He is most famous for the Shootout at the O.K. Corral.
August 15
— 1769: Napoleon Bonaparte (born Napoleone Buonaparte) was born on the island of Corsica.
— 1914: Panama Canal opened.
— 1969: Woodstock Musical Festival began in Bethel, New York and went on for 3 days.
August 16
— 1896: Gold was discovered in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Over 40,000 miners moved into the Klondike River region searching for gold.
August 17
— 1945: Indonesia declared independence from the Netherlands. The Dutch unsuccessfully tried to reconquer their former colony. In December 1949, the Dutch government finally recognized Indonesia as an independent country
August 18
— 1920: The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
August 19
— Five people were all hanged on the same day, convicted of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts: Martha Carrier, John Willard, John Proctor, George Jacobs Sr., and Reverend George Burroughs. Although they were executed on the same day, each of those five people were hanged one at a time. George Jacobs Sr. was an older man whose 16-year-old granddaughter testified against him and later retracted her testimony. Unfortunately, that was not enough and the testimony of other still condemned him to be hanged. The execution of Reverend Burroughs was unique. When he climbed the ladder and the executioners were about to put the noose around his neck, he loudly recited the Lord’s prayer. He said the Our Father perfectly. This stunned the crowd that was there watching the hangings. There was a belief that a witch could not recite the Lord’s prayer so some people thought this proved that he was innocent and should not be killed. But this did not save him and they hanged him anyway.
— 14 CE: Caesar Augustus (originally known as Octavian) died in what is now Nola, Italy. He was the first Roman emperor, reigning from 27 BCE until his death in 14 CE. The month of August is named for him.
— 1946: Future president Bill Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas.
August 20
— 1940: Leon Trotsky, exiled communist revolutionary from USSR, was stabbed with a small pickaxe outside Mexico City, Mexico on the orders of Joseph Stalin. He died the next day.
— 1968: Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia with approximately 200,000 soldiers and 5,000 tanks to crush the pro-democracy and liberalization movement known as the Prague Spring.
— 1833: Future president Benjamin Harrison was born in North Bend, Ohio. Harrison is the answer to a trivia question. Famously, Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms as president. Harrison is the person who was president in between Cleveland’s two terms in office.
August 21
— 1831: Nat Turner Rebellion began in Southampton County, Virginia — the largest slave revolt in U.S. history.
— 1858: First of 7 Lincoln-Douglas debates was held in Ottawa, Illinois.
— 1959: Hawaii became the 50th state. The U.S. annexed Hawaii when President William McKinley signed the joint resolution of Congress on July 7, 1898. The Flag Act of 1818 set the standard for the U.S. flag — the modern rule of having 13 red and white stripes representing the 13 original states and the number of stars match the current number of states. Every time a new state joined the union a star was added to the flag on the following Fourth of July. Starting on July 4, 1912, the American flag had 48 stars (you see those flags in World War II movies). The last two states, Alaska and Hawaii, both joined in 1959. However, Alaska was admitted as a state on January 3, 1959, and Hawaii not until August 21, 1959. This meant that a star was added on July 4, 1959, representing Alaska, but the 50th star was not added until July 4, 1960, representing Hawaii. So, for one year from July 1959 until July 1960 the U.S. had a 49-star flag (they are pretty rare). Those flags had 7 rows of 7 stars, but they were not in orderly columns; the even numbered rows were a little indented compared to the odd numbered rows. The present 50-star flag has existed since July 4, 1960.
August 22
— 1922: Irish independence leader Michael Collins was assassinated in County Cork, Ireland. Collins was one of the most indispensable men in Ireland’s battle for independence from Britain in the 1920s. In December 1921, Collins was one of the negotiators of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty was approved by the Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament) and ended the war for independence with Britain. However, the treaty was controversial and led to the Irish Civil War. Collins was killed by anti-treaty forces during the Irish Civil War.
August 23
— 1944: Hitler ordered the destruction of Paris. “Paris darf nicht oder nur als Trümmerfeld in die Hand des Feindes fallen.” (Paris must not fall into enemy hands or only as a field of rubble.) In the last year of World War II, the American, British, and Canadian armies were approaching Paris when Hitler ordered the city destroyed. Fortunately for the entire world, German General Dietrich von Choltitz refused to carry out Hitler’s orders and turned over an intact Paris.
— 1939: Nazi Germany and USSR signed a non-aggression pact. This cleared the way for Germany to invade Poland 9 days later, starting WWII.
— 1927: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were electrocuted at Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and avowed anarchists. They were convicted of murdering two men during an armed robbery on April 15, 1920. The evidence against the two men was scant and controversial. Large segments of the public believed that they were convicted mostly because of their political views and immigrant status.
— 1852: The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England transmitted its first telegraph signal for setting clocks. By the mid-1850s, most public clocks in Britain were set to Greenwich Mean Time. Although it was already in practical use, Greenwich Mean Time did not become Britain’s legal standard time until 1880.
August 24
— 1814: During the War of 1812, the British Army captured Washington D.C. and burned the Capital building, the White House, and several other government buildings.
— 79 CE: Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying the nearby Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. This is the traditional date cited by historians because August 24, 79 CE is the date listed in a letter from Pliny the Younger to Roman historian Tacitus. Pliny was an eyewitness to the eruption. However, archaeological findings in recent years indicate that the event may have occurred in October or November of 79 CE.
August 25
— 2012: Voyager 1, which was launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, left the solar system, becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space.
— 1706: Ann Putnam, one of the primary accusers of the Salem witch trials, submitted a written apology to the Salem Village church which was read to the congregation by the new pastor. This was 14 years after the Salem witch hunts. The confession read in part: “I, then being in my childhood, should, by such a providence of God, be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have been instrumental, with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood…”. Ann Putnam accused 62 people of witchcraft; 17 of those were hanged. She later died single and alone at the age of 37. Ann Putnam was the only one of the accusers to offer any type of an apology.
August 26
— 1883: Krakatau, also known as Krakatoa, (a small island located in what today is Indonesia) erupted in possibly the largest explosion ever on the Earth, killing approximately 36,000 people.
August 27
— 1927: Kellogg-Briand Pact signed. The U.S., Germany, Belgium, France, the U.K., Italy, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Poland, India, and Czechoslovakia, signed a treaty renouncing war. The pertinent sections of the treaty were: “Article I: The High Contracting Parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another. Article II: The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.” Of course, the treaty did not stop World War II from starting 12 years later.
— 1908: Future president Lyndon B. Johnson was born in Gillespie County, Texas.
— 1973: The USS Monitor (a Civil War ironclad ship which transformed naval warfare) was found approximately 16 miles (26 kilometers) off of North Carolina’s Outer Banks in approximately 240 feet (73 meters) of water. It had sunk during the U.S. Civil War on December 31, 1862. When the Monitor was discovered, the ship was upside down on the ocean floor. The Monitor had been deteriorating under the Atlantic for over a century. People wanted to raise the entire ship but there was a concern that it would break apart. In 2002, the revolutionary gun turret was raised. The turret is now located at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia. The rest of the Monitor is still on the ocean floor off of the Outer Banks.
August 28
— 1955: Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American from Chicago, was brutally beaten and murdered for supposedly whistling at a white woman (Carolyn Holloway Bryant) in Money, Mississippi. The woman’s husband and his half-brother (Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam) were later acquitted by an all-white jury despite evidence of their guilt. The January 24, 1956, issue of Look magazine contained “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” in which Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam admitted details of the murder. They were never punished for the heinous crime.
August 29
— 1949: USSR detonated its first atomic bomb, ending America’s nuclear monopoly.
— 2005: Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Louisiana, resulting in severe flooding as the levees protecting the city failed. This was one of the worst natural disasters in the United States since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
August 30
— 1983: Guion S. Bluford, Jr. became the first African American in space when the space shuttle Challenger was launched. Bluford eventually flew on four more space shuttle flights.
August 31
— 1888: Mary Ann Nichols was found murdered in the Whitechapel district of London, England. She is believed to be the first victim of Jack the Ripper.
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September
September 1
— 1939: Nazi Germany invaded Poland (code named “Case White”), starting World War II. Although a full scale war of annihilation between Japan and China had started in July of 1937, that horrendous war was limited to Asia. The invasion of Poland turned the conflicts into a world war.
— 1985: Titanic wreck was found approximately 13,000 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic.
September 2
— 1864: Union troops under General William T. Sherman captured Atlanta. The next day Sherman sent his famous telegram to President Lincoln: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.”
— 1945: Representatives of the Japanese Empire signed the formal surrender documents aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay, officially ending World War II.
— 1969: Ho Chi Minh died in Hanoi, Vietnam. We think he was 79 years old but nobody is really sure because there are no records regarding his birth. It is believed he died of heart failure.
— 31 BCE: Battle of Actium. In a naval battle off of the west coast of Greece, the forces of Caesar Augustus defeated the forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. This ended the Roman civil wars, and Augustus was now the undisputed Emperor of the Roman Empire.
September 3
— 1783: Treaty of Paris was signed officially ending the American Revolution — even though fighting in the 13 colonies had essentially ceased in October 1781 with the fall of Yorktown.
September 4
— 1781: Los Angeles (officially “El Pueblo de la Reyna de Los Angeles” — The Town of the Queen of Angels) was founded by the Spanish. Actually, there is an ongoing dispute about the original name. Was it spelled “la Reyna” or “la Reina”? Some claim the correct name is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles” — The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels. But the name “El Pueblo de la Reyna de Los Angeles” is the name on the first handwritten map in 1785 and is probably correct.
September 5
— 1774: First Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
— 1975: Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (a member of the Charles Manson family cult) tried to shoot President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, California. When she pointed her pistol at the president, one of the Secret Service agents, Larry Buendorf, grabbed the gun, preventing it from firing. Other Secret Service agents seized Fromme. Ford was not hurt. Fromme was sentenced to life in prison but was paroled in 2009 (serving 34 years). Another attempt on Ford’s life occurred only 17 days later in San Francisco.
September 6
— 1522: The Victoria, one of Magellan’s five ships, returned to Spain, becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the globe. Only 18 of the original approximately 240 men (on the five ships) completed the trip around the earth. Magellan did not make it (he was killed in the Philippines). The Victoria sailed somewhere between 43,000 and 53,000 statute miles, or about 69,000 to 85,000 kilometers.
— 1492: Columbus and his three ships departed the Canary Islands and sailed into the great unknown, truly off the map. They left Spain on August 3 but stopped in the Canary Islands.
— 1901: President William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York. He died eight days later.
September 7
— 1876: The James-Younger gang met its demise while trying to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota. Only Jesse James and his brother Frank were not captured or killed. The three Younger brothers were sent to jail. The James brothers made it back to Missouri and continued their outlaw lives.
September 8
— 1974: President Gerald Ford pardoned former president Richard Nixon for any and all crimes he may have committed while in office.
September 9
— 1776: The name “United States of America” became official. According to the diary of John Adams, the Continental Congress declared: “Resolved, that in all Continental Commissions, and other Instruments where heretofore the words, ‘United Colonies,’ have been used, the Stile be altered for the future to the United States.” [spelling in the original]
— 1850: California was admitted as the 31st state. This was only two years after the U.S. acquired this region from Mexico as part of the settlement of the Mexican American War. California grew so quickly because of gold being discovered in January 1848.
September 10
— 1813: During the War of 1812, after the American naval victory over the British in the Battle of Lake Erie, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry sent the famous dispatch to Major General William Henry Harrison: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” The War of 1812 would drag on for more than another year and end in essentially a stalemate.
September 11
— 2001: Terrorists seized control of four jetliners, crashing two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and crashing one into the Pentagon in Northern Virginia. The fourth did not strike any buildings but crashed in a field in Pennsylvania due to the heroics of the passengers.
September 12
— 1958: In the case of Cooper v. Aaron 358 U.S. 1 (1958), the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ordered the immediate desegregation of Little Rock (Arkansas) Central High School.
— 1913: Jesse Owens, arguably the greatest track and field star in U.S. history (he gets my vote), was born in Alabama. His given name was actually James Cleveland Owens. Growing up he went by his initials: J.C. When he was 9 years old his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. When he enrolled in school in Cleveland the teacher did not understand his southern accent. When she asked him his name and he said “J.C.” she thought he was saying “Jesse” and started calling him that. Amazingly he just went by Jesse for the rest of his life.
September 13
— 1993: The “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements” (commonly referred to as the “Oslo Accords” because the negotiations began in Oslo, Norway) was signed at the U.S. White House as a peace accord between Israel and Palestine. Israel acknowledged the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, and the PLO renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace. President Bill Clinton hosted the ceremony which culminated in the famous photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat shaking hands. Obviously, this did not end hostilities in the region.
September 14
— 1901: President William McKinley died in Buffalo, New York. He had been shot on September 6, 1901, by Leon Czolgosz. His vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, became president.
— 1847: In the Mexican American War, U.S. troops led by General Winfield Scott captured Mexico City.
— 1814: Aboard a British warship named the HMS Tonnant, American Francis Scott Key started writing a poem about seeing the American flag still flying over Fort McHenry (in Baltimore, Maryland) after approximately 25 hours of shelling from British ships during the War of 1812. When he got back to Baltimore, Key finished the poem titled “Defense of Fort McHenry”. The words of the poem were added to an existing tune called “Anacreon in Heaven”. The poem, now song, was soon published in newspapers in Baltimore and then throughout the United States under the new title “The Star-Spangled Banner”. In 1931, it was officially adopted as the national anthem of the U.S.
September 15
— 1916: Tanks were used for the first time in warfare by British troops at the Battle of the Somme in France.
— 1857: Future president (and future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) William Howard Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
— 1950: Amphibious landing at Inchon by U.S. troops commanded by General Douglas MacArthur turned the tide of the Korean War.
September 16
— 1620: The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England for North America. A crew of 30, along with 102 passengers (now known as the Pilgrims), eventually reached Cape Cod, Massachusetts on November 21.
— 1810: Mexican Independence Day. This commemorates the day Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a Catholic priest known as Father Hidalgo, called for Mexican independence from Spain. The call for independence is known as “El Grito de Dolores” (Cry of Dolores). Contrary to the belief of many in the United States, Cinco de Mayo has nothing to do with Mexican independence. That holiday celebrates the May 5, 1862, Mexican victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla.
— 1932: In a tragic event, Peg Entwistle, a British actress who moved to Los Angeles to try to make it in movies, committed suicide. She climbed to the top of the “H” in the Hollywood sign and jumped off the top of the 50 foot letter and died. At that time the sign read “Hollywoodland” because it was an advertisement for a housing development. In 1949, the Chamber of Commerce for Hollywood and the City of Los Angeles renovated the sign and removed the last four letters which read “land”, so now the sign simply read Hollywood.
September 17
— 1787: U.S. Constitution was signed by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The Constitution was later sent to be ratified by the states.
— 1862: Battle of Antietam. This one day battle in the U.S. Civil War occurred near Sharpsburg, Maryland. It is still the bloodiest single day (the highest number of casualties) in U.S. history (with approximately 3,600 killed and approximately 17,000 wounded). Gettysburg was the biggest battle (by number of casualties) of the Civil War, but it was spread out over 3 days.
September 18
— 1793: Cornerstone of U.S. Capitol was laid by President George Washington.
— 2020: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court’s second female justice, died at her home in Washington at the age of 87 of complications from pancreatic cancer.
September 19
— 1881: President James A. Garfield died in Elberon, New Jersey. He was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1881, by Charles J. Guiteau. His vice president, Chester A. Arthur, became president.
September 20
— 1519: The Armada de Molucca, commanded by Ferdinand Magellan, departed from the Spanish port of Salucar de Barrameda with five ships. The expedition sailed down around the southern part of South America into the Pacific. On September 6, 1522, only one of those five ships, the Victoria, returned to Spain (with only 18 men on board), having sailed from the Pacific through the Indian Ocean, down around the southern tip of Africa, and back to Spain. It was the first circumnavigation of the world.
September 21
— 1981: Belize (formerly British Honduras) gained independence from UK. It was the last British colony on the American mainland.
September 22
— 1862: Abraham Lincoln announced the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which he would later sign, and which would go into effect, on New Year’s Day 1863.
— 1975: After surviving an assassination attempt 17 days earlier, President Gerald Ford was shot at in San Francisco, California by Sara Jane Moore. She fired two shots at Ford, but both missed. Moore spent 32 years in prison.
— 1980: Iran-Iraq war began.
— 1692: Eight people were all hanged on the same day, convicted of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts: Alice Parker, Mary Parker (it is unclear if they were related, possibly through marriage), Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Redd, Margaret Scott, Samuel Wardwell, Martha Corey, and Mary Easty. Those were the last hangings or executions of any kind in the Salem witch trials.
September 23
— 63 BCE: Caesar Augustus (originally known as Octavian) was born in Rome. He became the first Roman emperor, reigning from 27 BCE until his death in 14 CE.
— 1846: Planet Neptune was discovered. According to NASA’s website: “With the 1781 discovery of Uranus, the number of known planets in the solar system grew to seven. As astronomers continued to observe the newly discovered planet, they noticed irregularities in its orbit that Newton’s law of universal gravitation could not fully explain. However, effects from the gravity of a more distant planet could explain these perturbances. By 1845, Uranus had completed nearly one full revolution around the Sun and astronomers Urbain Jean-Joseph Le Verrier in Paris and John Couch Adams in Cambridge, England, independently calculated the location of this postulated planet. Based on Le Verrier’s calculations, on the night of Sept. 23-24, 1846, astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle used the Fraunhofer telescope at the Berlin Observatory and made the first observations of the new planet, only 1 degree from its calculated position. In retrospect, following its formal discovery, it turned out that several astronomers, starting with Galileo Galilei in 1612, had observed Neptune too, but because of its slow motion relative to the background stars, did not recognize it as a planet.”
September 24
— 1906: President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Devils Tower in Wyoming as the first national monument.
September 25
— 1513: Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa, along with men under his command, crossed the Isthmus of Panama and became the first Europeans to see the Pacific Ocean. The exact day is in dispute (sources differ as to whether it occurred on September 25 or September 27).
— 1957: “Little Rock Nine” (9 African American students) began classes at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, integrating the school for the first time.
— 1066: Battle of Stamford Bridge. A large Viking army under King Harald Hardrada invaded England from Norway. They were soundly defeated at the battle of Stamford Bridge by Anglo-Saxon forces under King Harold Godwinson a.k.a. King Harold II. Viking King Harald Hardrada was killed in the battle.
September 26
— 1580: The Golden Hind, commanded by Francis Drake, returned to Plymouth, England, becoming only the second ship to circumnavigate the Earth.
— 1960: Candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon participated in the first televised presidential debate in Chicago, Illinois.
— 1934: U.S. Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage announced that the American Olympic Committee officially accepted the invitation to participate in the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany. The U.S., and other countries, had considered a boycott because of Nazi policies against the Jews. But when Brundage went to Berlin in 1934, he was treated to a very sanitized version of Nazi Germany. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels did an excellent job of hiding the atrocities from the American delegation.
September 27
— 1940: The Tripartite Pact was signed creating an alliance between Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. A little over a year later, the United States would be at war with all three of those countries.
September 28
— 1542: Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo arrived in San Diego Bay, becoming the first European in what would become California.
September 29
— 1789: Congress passed “An act to recognize and adapt to the Constitution of the United States, the establishment of the troops raised under the resolves of the United States in Congress assembled”, legalizing the existing U.S. Army.
September 30
— 1962: African American James Meredith tried to enroll in the University of Mississippi, resulting in a riot. Two people died, 206 marshals and soldiers were wounded, and 200 individuals were arrested. On October 1, protected by Federal forces, Meredith was allowed to register for courses and integrated the University of Mississippi.
— 1938: In Munich, Germany, an agreement was signed between the United Kingdom, France, and Nazi Germany, averting war at the cost of granting Germany permission to annex the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.
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October
October 1
— 2017: Stephen Paddock commits the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. From his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, he shoots more than 1000 bullets at people outdoors in Las Vegas, Nevada. He kills 60 people and wounds an additional 411.
— 1890: Yosemite National Park is created by an act of Congress.
— 1924: Future president Jimmy Carter is born in Plains, Georgia.
October 2
— 1835: Texas revolution begins with the Battle of Gonzales, leading to Texas becoming an independent republic.
— 1985: Rock Hudson is the first major celebrity to die of AIDS.
October 3
— 1952: The United Kingdom becomes the third country (joining the United States and the U.S.S.R.) with nuclear weapons when it detonates an atomic bomb on the Monte Bello Islands, off the west coast of Australia.
— 1990: Germany is reunited as the single state of Germany. After World War II, Germany was occupied and divided into four occupation zones by the main Allied powers. In May 1949 the U.S., U.K., and France combined their occupation zones into the democratic state of the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly referred to as West Germany. In October 1949, the U.S.S.R. formed the communist state of the German Democratic Republic, usually called East Germany.
— 1995: O.J. Simpson is acquitted of murdering his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, in Los Angeles, California.
October 4
— 1957: U.S.S.R. launches Earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. This is the start of the space race.
— 1927: Work commences on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, carving the heads of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. Mount Rushmore National Memorial is declared completed on October 31, 1941.
— 1822: Future president Rutherford B. Hayes is born in Delaware, Ohio.
October 5
— 1813: During the war of 1812, American forces commanded by future U.S. president William Henry Harrison defeat British forces in the Battle of the Thames near present day Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Shawnee chief Tecumseh is killed in the battle. Tecumseh had allied his Native American Confederacy with the British in an attempt to stop United States expansion into Native American lands.
— 1829: Future president Chester A. Arthur is born in Fairfield, Vermont, near the Canadian border. Actually, the date and location of Arthur’s birth are the subject of controversy. Arthur was never elected president. He was vice president when James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 and Arthur was elevated to president. Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states in pertinent part: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President…”. Article XII of the U.S. Constitution states in pertinent part: “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” Around the election of 1880 (when Arthur was running for vice president) questions arose as to whether Arthur was an American citizen. His father was from Ireland (and did not become an American citizen by the time of Arthur’s birth) and his mother was American. But at that time, it was the father’s nationality that counted. So, it all hinged on whether he was born in the United States. But there were claims that he was born in Canada, not Vermont. To this day there have been no records found documenting on which side of the border Arthur was born.
October 6
— 1973: Yom Kippur War begins as Egypt and Syria attack Israel’s forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The war ends 19 days later with a ceasefire on October 25, 1973.
— 1981: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is assassinated in Cairo by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
October 7
— 2001: War in Afghanistan commences as U.S. led coalition forces open bombing campaign. Ground forces are deployed two weeks later.
— 1949: East Germany is proclaimed as a separate country. After World War II, Germany was occupied and divided into four occupation zones by the main Allied powers. In May 1949 the U.S., U.K., and France combined their occupation zones into the democratic state of the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly referred to as West Germany. The U.S.S.R. formed the communist state of the German Democratic Republic, usually called East Germany. The two countries were reunited on October 3, 1990, as the single state of Germany.
October 8
— 1871: Great Chicago Fire begins in the barn of Mrs. O’Leary (probably not the fault of her cow). Fire blazes for 2 days destroying much of Chicago.
— 1869: Former president Franklin Pierce dies in Concord, New Hampshire.
October 9
— 1967: Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara is executed by the Bolivian army.
October 10
— 1973: Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns from office due to charges of income tax evasion and political corruption. Surprisingly, his resignation had nothing to do with the Watergate scandal. In the midst of a giant constitutional crisis throughout 1973 and 1974 based upon Watergate, a totally separate scandal arose. A federal investigation of political corruption in Maryland found evidence that Agnew had been taking bribes from his days as governor of Maryland and continued taking bribes while vice president of the United States. To avoid prison time, Agnew made a deal with the Justice Department whereby he pled “nolo contendere”, meaning “no contest”, to one charge of income tax evasion and resigned the vice presidency. The 25th amendment to the Constitution had just been ratified in 1967, stating in pertinent part: “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.” Richard Nixon nominated Gerald Ford to be the new vice president and Ford was confirmed overwhelmingly by both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
October 11
— 2002: Former President Jimmy Carter is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
— 1899: Boer War begins in South Africa between the Boers/Afrikaners and the British imperial troops.
October 12
— 1492: Christopher Columbus and his expedition on behalf of the Spanish monarchs land in the Bahamas. The exact island is unknown.
October 13
— 1792: The cornerstone for the Executive Mansion, which will later be dubbed the White House, is laid in the newly created federal capital of Washington D.C. The first occupant was John Adams (second president of the United States). Every president since John Adams has resided in the White House for at least part of his presidency. On August 24, 1814, British troops burned the White House during the War of 1812. President James Madison lived in the White House before the fire. The next president, James Monroe, was inaugurated in March 1817. He did not move into the Executive Mansion until the rebuilt White House was ready for occupancy in 1818. George Washington is the only U.S. president who did not live in the White House.
October 14
— 1912: Former President Theodore Roosevelt is shot by John Flammang Schrank in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Roosevelt was getting into a car which was to take him to the Milwaukee Auditorium for a campaign speech when Schrank shot him once at close range in the chest. The bullet was greatly slowed because it passed through Roosevelt’s coat, glasses case, and the folded copy of his lengthy speech. Amazingly, Roosevelt gave his hour-long speech before going to the hospital where doctors determined it was safest to leave the bullet in his chest.
— 1947: Chuck Yeager is the first person to break the sound barrier, flying the X-1 rocket plane over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California, reaching Mach 1.06.
— 1964: Martin Luther King Jr. wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent campaign against racism.
— 1066: The Battle of Hastings. William the Conqueror of Normandy defeats English King Harold II.
— 1890: Future president Dwight D. Eisenhower is born in Denison, Texas.
October 15
— 1917: Mata Hari is executed by the French for spying on behalf of Germany in World War I.
— 1582: The Gregorian calendar goes into effect in the Papal States, Spain, and Portugal. Starting in 45 BCE, the Roman Empire, and later Western Europe, used the Julian calendar, which was invented by Julius Caesar, with the help of the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes. The Julian calendar had 365 days and added an extra day every four years (leap year) to February. By the 1500s it was clear that the Julian calendar was not in sync with the actual solar year. This meant that the first day of spring was not close to March 21. Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull for the adoption of a new calendar which is known as the Gregorian calendar. It is the same as the Julian calendar except there are no leap years for years ending in “00” unless the year is exactly divisible by 400. Example: the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, but the year 2000 was. To align the Gregorian calendar with the solar year, 10 days were skipped in October 1582. The day after October 4 was designated as October 15, 1582. Use of the Gregorian calendar spread throughout Europe. Because of antagonism with the Vatican, Britain and its Empire did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until September 1752.
October 16
— 1934: The Long March begins as Mao Zedong led Chinese Communists escape from Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-shek. The retreat lasts over a year and covers approximately 6,000 miles.
— 1946: Ten former Nazi officials are hanged in Nuremberg, Germany after being convicted of crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg trials were held between November 20, 1945, and August 31, 1946. The comprehensive evidence created a thorough record of most of the Nazi regime’s worst crimes. Final verdicts were announced on October 1, 1946. Three of the defendants were acquitted, 12 defendants were sentenced to death, and the rest received sentences between 10 years to life in prison. The reason there were only 10 hangings out of 12 death sentences was because Nazi party secretary Martin Bormann was tried in absentia. It was believed he was still alive. However, a DNA test in 1998 confirmed that Bormann had died in Berlin at the end of the war. The other condemned prisoner who was not hanged was Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. He committed suicide the night before he was scheduled to be hanged. For 59 years there was a mystery as to how Göring got the cyanide. But in 2005 a former American prison guard named Herbert Lee Stivers told the Los Angeles Times that a young German woman named Mona had fooled Stivers into smuggling a vial of liquid to Goering’s cell hidden in a fountain pen, telling Stivers it was medicine. It is unclear whether this story is true.
October 17
— 1989: A 6.9 magnitude earthquake hits the San Francisco Bay area during game 3 of the World Series featuring the two local teams: the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. (Author’s note: I was working on the 16th floor of an office in downtown Los Angeles at the time the earthquake struck. The miniblinds started tapping against my window. I realized it was an earthquake and turned on the radio to see where the epicenter was. When the news said that it was in the Bay Area, I knew this was serious since I could feel it over 300 miles/500 km away.)
October 18
— 1867: Possession of Alaska is formally transferred from Russia to the United States. Secretary of State William Henry Seward engineered the purchase of Alaska for $7.2 million.
— 1972: Clean Water Act becomes law in the U.S.
— 1931: Thomas Edison dies in West Orange, New Jersey.
October 19
— 202 BCE: Battle of Zama is fought south of the city of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia). Roman General Scipio triumphs over Hannibal and his Carthaginian army. This ends the Second Punic War and earns Scipio the agnomen “Africanus”. Hannibal was almost considered invincible — until he faced Scipio Africanus.
— 1781: The British Army, under the command of General Cornwallis, surrenders to the American army led by General George Washington at Yorktown, Virginia. Although negotiations to sign the treaty drag on for almost 2 years (the Treaty of Paris is finally signed by U.S. and British representatives on September 3, 1783), this victory by the Americans essentially ends the American Revolution.
October 20
— 2011: Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi is killed by rebel forces near Sirte, Libya. He had been in power since 1969.
— 1973: Sydney Opera House opens.
— 1964: Former president Herbert Hoover dies in New York City.
October 21
— 1805: Battle of Trafalgar. The British Navy under Admiral Horatio Nelson defeats the combined French and Spanish fleet off of the coast of Spain. Nelson dies in the battle. When the battle was about to start, Nelson ordered the famous flag message: “England expects that every man will do his duty”.
— 1959: Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens in Manhattan.
October 22
— 1962: President John F. Kennedy gives a televised address informing the world of Soviet missile bases in Cuba. This is the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is the closest the world has ever come to a nuclear exchange. Fortunately for the entire world, a peaceful resolution was reached.
October 23
— 42 BCE: Battle of Philippi. This was actually the second Battle of Philippi (in modern day Greece). The first occurred on October 3, 42 BCE but was not conclusive. The second battle on October 23 proves decisive. The army led by Mark Antony and Octavian (later known as Augustus) defeat the army of Brutus and Cassius, ending a civil war between the assassins of Julius Caesar and the Second Triumvirate. Brutus and Cassius both commit suicide.
— 1983: 241 U.S. Marines are killed by a suicide bomber in their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.
October 24
— 1648: Treaty of Westphalia is signed, ending the Thirty Years’ War in Europe.
October 25
— 1929: Teapot Dome scandal. Former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall becomes the first person to ever be convicted for a crime committed while serving in the U.S. Cabinet. In exchange for bribes, Fall had leased oil reserves belonging to the U.S. Navy at Teapot Dome in Wyoming (as well the Navy oil reserves at Elk Hills in California) to private companies.
— 1944: Battle of Leyte Gulf. First use of kamikaze bombings by Japanese air forces against the U.S. Navy.
— 1881: Pablo Picasso is born in Malaga, Spain.
October 26
— 1881: Shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. To be accurate, it was a gunfight in an empty lot on Fremont Street between Fly’s Photography Studio and the Harwood House. That lot was only about 18 feet wide. The O.K. Corral itself was located on Allen Street but there was a rear entrance on Fremont Street. The famous gunfight took place about 6 lots west of the rear entrance to the O.K. Corral. It is unclear how the gunfight became known as the shootout at the O.K. Corral. Wyatt Earp and his two brothers, Morgan and Virgil, along with their friend Doc Holliday, killed three “cowboys”: Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and Billy Clanton. Three of the “cowboys”, Billy Claiborne, Wes Fuller, and Ike Clanton, were probably unarmed and ran away either just before, or right after, the shooting began. When the shooting started, they were all within approximately 10 feet of each other. In the gunfight (which took only about 30 seconds) Morgan Earp was shot in the shoulder and Virgil Earp was shot in the calf. Both would recover from their injuries. Doc Holliday was grazed by a bullet but not seriously wounded. Tom McLaury was killed by a shotgun blast from Doc Holliday. Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton both died of multiple gunshots, including the first shot by Wyatt Earp which hit Frank McLaury in the abdomen. When the shooting was over only Wyatt Earp was unscathed.
— 1825: Erie Canal opens in upstate New York, linking the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, creating a shipping connection from the upper Midwest to the Atlantic Ocean via New York City.
October 27
— 1904: New York City subway system opens.
— 1858: Future president Theodore Roosevelt is born in New York City.
October 28
— 1886: The Statue of Liberty is dedicated on Bedloe’s Island (now called Liberty Island) in New York Harbor. The official name is “Liberty Enlightening the World” and is a gift from the people of France to the people of the U.S. There is a broken shackle and chains at the statute’s feet symbolizing the end of slavery. In her left hand she is holding a tablet which is inscribed with the date of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, but in Roman numerals. In the statue’s right hand, she is holding a torch. The Statue of Liberty is 305 feet tall in total; the statue itself is 151 feet tall and the pedestal is 154 feet tall.
— 1965: The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri is completed. The arch is 630 feet tall and is also 630 feet wide. It is situated in the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, commemorating America’s westward expansion. It is made out of polished stainless steel in the shape of an inverted catenary curve.
— 1940: Fascist Italy invades Greece from Albania.
October 29
— 1929: Black Tuesday: the New York Stock Exchange collapses. This is usually considered the beginning of the Great Depression.
October 30
— 1938: Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre broadcast the “War of the Worlds” on the radio, causing panic throughout the U.S.
— 1735: Future president John Adams is born in Braintree (now Quincy) Massachusetts.
October 31
— 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg (in modern day Germany), leading to the Protestant Reformation.
— 1864: In the midst of the Civil War, Nevada is admitted as the 36th state.
— 1926: Escape artist Harry Houdini dies in Detroit, Michigan of peritonitis.
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November
November 1
— 1950: Two Puerto Rican pro-independence activists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, attempt to assassinate President Harry S. Truman. They were stopped by security guards at Blair House in Washington D.C. where Truman was residing during renovations to the White House. White House policeman Leslie W. Coffelt was killed and a Secret Service agent was wounded. Truman was never in danger.
— 1512: The incredible ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti, is unveiled to the public.
— 1993: The 12 nation European Union is officially established by the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty). The original members were Ireland, Italy, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
— 1755: A huge earthquake destroys Lisbon, Portugal. The magnitude is estimated in the range of 8.5-9.0. Approximately 40 minutes after the earthquake, a tsunami immersed the harbor and downtown Lisbon, rushing up the Tagus River. The destruction covered parts of Portugal, Spain, and Morocco with an estimated 70,000 dead in those three countries.
November 2
— 1889: North Dakota and South Dakota are admitted to the Union on the same day, becoming the 39th and 40th states. This was because of a fight among the people of the Dakota territory as to where their capital should be located. Instead of resolving the controversy, Congress decided to just divide the Dakota territory into 2 separate states and admit them at the same time. That is why we have North Dakota and South Dakota.
— 1865: Future president Warren G. Harding is born in Blooming Grove, Ohio.
— 1795: Future president James K. Polk is born in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
November 3
— 2014: One World Trade Center officially opens next to the location of the Twin Towers which had been destroyed in the September 11, 2001, suicide attacks.
— 1957: A dog named Laika becomes the first living creature to orbit the Earth as the Soviets launch Sputnik 2. The capability of returning a capsule safely to Earth had not yet been developed. This was a one-way mission. Laika dies long before she runs out of oxygen because the loss of the heat shield made the temperature in the capsule rise to unsafe levels. Due to falsified records by the Soviets at the time, it is unclear how long Laika lived. But it is agreed that she did orbit the earth at least several times.
November 4
— 1922: Tomb of King Tutankhamen is discovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter and crew in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
— 1956: Soviets brutally crush Hungarian uprising with tanks and troops in Budapest killing an estimated 2,500 people.
November 5
— 1605: Gunpowder Plot. Guy Fawkes is caught in a plan to blow up the English Parliament. The event is annually celebrated in the United Kingdom as Guy Fawkes Day.
— 2009: Major Nidal Malik Hasan of the U.S. Army goes on a shooting spree killing 13 and wounding 30 others at Fort Hood, Texas.
November 6
— 1860: Abraham Lincoln is elected president of the United States. Lincoln received less than 40% of the popular vote in a four-way election (although Lincoln received by far the most popular votes). Lincoln easily won the electoral college with 180 electoral votes. Southern Democrat John Breckinridge received 72 electoral votes. Constitutional Union candidate John Bell received 39 electoral votes. Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas received 12 electoral votes. Because they believed that Lincoln might interfere with slavery, seven southern states seceded from the union before Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, leading four more states to secede. After four years of the bloodiest war in American history, Lincoln was successful in restoring the union and finally ending the curse of slavery in the United States.
November 7
— 1885: Canada’s first transcontinental railway is completed.
— 1917: Bolsheviks take over the government in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), Russia. Lenin would later move the capital from Petrograd to Moscow. Russians often refer to this incident as the October Revolution because, in 1917, Russia used the Julian calendar. On the Julian calendar the event occurred on October 25. Starting in 45 BCE, the Roman Empire, and later Western Europe, used the Julian calendar, which was invented by Julius Caesar, with the help of the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes. The Julian calendar had 365 days and added an extra day every four years (leap year) to February. By the 1500s it was clear that the Julian calendar was not in sync with the actual solar year. This meant that the first day of spring was not close to March 21. Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull for the adoption of a new calendar which is known as the Gregorian calendar. It is the same as the Julian calendar except there are no leap years for years ending in “00” unless the year is exactly divisible by 400. Example: the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, but the year 2000 was. To align the Gregorian calendar with the solar year, 10 days were skipped in October 1582. The day after October 4 was designated as October 15, 1582. Use of the Gregorian calendar spread throughout Europe. However, Russia did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918. On the Gregorian calendar, the Bolsheviks takeover was November 7.
November 8
— 1889: Montana is admitted as the 41st state.
— 1923: Adolf Hitler and fellow Nazis attempt to overthrow the democratic German government (known as the Weimar Republic). This attempted insurrection is called the “Beer Hall Putsch” because it began in a beer hall named the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, Germany. Political, military, and police leaders of the state of Bavaria were meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller. Hitler tried to convince them through argument and threats to join his Nazi fanatics to overtake the Bavarian government and eventually march on Berlin to overthrow the government of all of Germany. The Bavarian leaders did not join Hitler. The next day Hitler led approximately 2000 Nazis to the center of Munich. The Nazis were met by police and military forces and a shootout occurred. At least 14 Nazis were killed along with 4 policemen. Hitler was arrested and convicted. Throughout history a common punishment for an armed insurrection such as this was the death penalty. However, Hitler only received a sentence of 5 years. Amazingly, he did not even serve his full sentence. He was released after only serving 9 months. While in prison he wrote his insane manifesto “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”).
November 9
— 1938: Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Nazis throughout Germany conduct organized terror and destroy synagogues, as well as Jewish homes, schools and businesses. Approximately 100 Jews are killed in the violence and approximately 30,000 Jews are arrested and sent to concentration camps on the sole ground of being Jewish. Although Jews had been oppressed throughout Germany since the rise of Adolf Hitler in January 1933, this was a major escalation in the Nazi agenda of violence against the Jews which would culminate in the Holocaust and the murder of approximately 6 million Jews in Europe.
— 1989: The Berlin Wall is opened, allowing people to travel freely between democratic West Berlin and communist East Berlin. This occurred by accident. In response to protests by the citizens of East Germany, an East Berlin party official named Günter Schabowski announced at a press conference upcoming travel reforms which were going to allow citizens of East Germany to travel more freely to West Berlin. When questioned at the press conference when this policy would go into effect, Günter Schabowski said immediately. He meant the program of applying for visits to West Germany would start right away. But people mistakenly thought that the border between East Berlin and West Berlin was immediately opened. Thousands of people flocked to Checkpoint Charlie and demanded to enter West Berlin. The East German guards did not know what to do and eventually stepped aside and let people cross into West Berlin. Thousands of West Berliners arrived at Checkpoint Charlie and other points of the wall. People started climbing onto the wall, others took sledgehammers or any other tools they could find to knock pieces out of this horrible symbol of oppression. The Berlin Wall was now open. Eleven months later the unification treaty went into effect and as of October 3, 1990, Germany was reunited as one country and as a democracy, and its capital was a reunited Berlin.
November 10
— 1969: Sesame Street debuts on public television.
— 1898: Wilmington Massacre and Coup D’état. In Wilmington, North Carolina, white supremacists go to Black neighborhoods, killing and injuring Black citizens and destroying Black-owned businesses, including burning down the building of “The Daily Record” (the Black-owned newspaper). There is a dispute as to the number of casualties, but it appears that approximately 60 Blacks were killed (although some estimates go as high as 300). The mayor and city council were forced to resign at gunpoint and the mob installed its own city government.
November 11
— 1889: Washington is admitted as the 42nd state. It is the fourth state admitted into the union in the month of November 1889 (the other 3 states: North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana).
— 1918: Armistice Day. At the 11th hour, on the 11th day, of the 11th month, World War I stops on the Western front. At 11:00 AM on November 11, 1918, an armistice went into effect between the Western Allies and Germany. The holiday is now known as Veterans Day in the United States and Remembrance Day in the British Commonwealth of Nations. After many months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, officially ending the war between Germany and the Western Allies. That was exactly 5 years after the event which essentially started World War I. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo. This set off a chain of events which plunged the world into the greatest war ever seen up to that date.
November 12
— 1954: Ellis Island closes. Starting in 1892, more than 12 million immigrants passed the Statue of Liberty and landed on Ellis Island in New York Harbor to be interviewed and examined before admittance into the U.S. Some were quarantined at Ellis Island, and some were sent back to their homelands. Author’s note: two of my grandparents passed through Ellis Island from Italy in 1905 and 1913.
November 13
— 1956: U.S. Supreme Court issues its opinion in Gayle v. Browder 352 US 903 (1956). Martin Luther King, Jr. led a boycott of the racially segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama. The Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated transportation systems enforced by the government violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads in pertinent part:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
November 14
— 1940: The German Luftwaffe bombs the English city of Coventry. This is considered the most concentrated air attack against a British city in World War II. Although there are some disputes about the exact numbers, at least 300 (and possibly over 400) German bombers dropped over 500 tons of explosives along with 33,000 incendiary bombs. Over 500 people were killed, and a large percentage of the homes and factories in Coventry were damaged (with a large number destroyed). For years there had been reports that Winston Churchill knew that Coventry was targeted for a massive air raid but did nothing about it. Historians now believe that is not true. The British military decrypted German messages and were aware of an impending major German bombing raid, but not the location.
November 15
— 1777: The Second Continental Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. This set up the national government for the United States during the American Revolution. By 1787, it was clear that the Articles of Confederation were ineffective. So, a Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia from May to September 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they created an entirely new document: the U.S. Constitution which is still in effect and is the framework of the United States government.
November 16
— 1907: Oklahoma is admitted as the 46th state.
— 1776: Battle of Fort Washington. During the American Revolution, Commander-In-Chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, had two forts built on opposite sides of the Hudson River. On the New Jersey side the position was named Fort Lee (named for Continental Army General Charles Lee). On the Manhattan side the position was named Fort Washington. The idea was to control the Hudson River to prevent the British Navy from sailing up the Hudson. On November 16, 1776, the British overran Fort Washington and four days later captured Fort Lee. Today there is a city in that location named Fort Lee, New Jersey. And on the Manhattan side is Fort Washington Park. This is why the prodigious suspension bridge at that location is named the George Washington Bridge.
November 17
— 1558: Elizabeth I becomes queen of England and reigns until her death in 1603.
— 1869: Suez Canal opens. The canal connects the Mediterranean Sea at Port Said to the Red Sea (via the Gulf of Suez) at Port Tewfik in the city of Suez. The canal allows shipping between Europe and South or East Asia to take a much shorter route. Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal ships had to go all the way around the southern part of Africa to reach the Indian Ocean. The Suez Canal cut out thousands of miles/kilometers.
November 18
— 1883: Time zones go into effect in the U.S. and Canada. Time zones were created by the railroads to create standard times throughout the four regions in the continental U.S. and Canada (additional time zones would be added later). Prior to that time each city or town set its own local time by determining when the sun was at its zenith and designating that as noon. It was chaos.
— 1978: Cult leader Jim Jones convinces over 900 of his followers to commit suicide by drinking poison in Jonestown, Guyana.
— 1886: Former president Chester A. Arthur dies in New York City.
November 19
— 1863: “Four score and seven years ago….” Arguably the greatest speech in American history was delivered by President Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, site of the largest battle ever in the Western Hemisphere. The text of the Gettysburg Address is inscribed on a wall inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is inscribed on another wall in the memorial.
— 1831: Future president James A. Garfield is born in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
November 20
— 1815: Second Treaty of Paris is signed. This officially ends the Napoleonic Wars.
— 1942: Future president Joe Biden is born in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
November 21
— 1783: First untethered hot air balloon flight carrying humans occurs over Paris, piloted by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and Francois Laurent d’Arlandes.
— 1789: North Carolina ratifies the U.S. Constitution and becomes the 12th state.
November 22
— 1963: President John F. Kennedy is shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald (acting alone) in Dallas, Texas. His vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, becomes president.
November 23
— 1863: Battle of Chattanooga begins in the U.S. Civil War. Over the next two days, Union armies under U.S. Grant soundly defeat Confederate troops. The state of Tennessee would remain under Union control for the rest of the war. The city of Chattanooga became a supply base for Federal forces. Union General William T. Sherman used Chattanooga as a base for his Atlanta campaign the following spring.
— 1936: “Life” magazine is published for the first time.
— 1804: Future president Franklin Pierce is born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire. As president, Pierce supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 which overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the prohibition against slavery in territories north of the latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes. This opened all western territories to slavery, causing violence in Kansas and greater animosity throughout the U.S. This was one of the main steps that led to the Civil War.
November 24
— 1859: Charles Darwin publishes his seminal book: “On the Origin of Species”.
— 1971: A hijacker known as D.B. Cooper parachutes out of the back of a Northwest Airlines Boeing 727 over Washington state with $200,000 ransom money. He is never found, and it is unknown if he survived the jump into the frigid thunderstorm when he was only wearing a business suit.
— 1784: Future president Zachary Taylor is born in Orange County, Virginia. Taylor was one of the two commanding generals who became heroes for the U.S. in the Mexican-American war (the other was Winfield Scott).
— 1963: Dallas strip club owner Jack Ruby shoots and kills President Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the basement of a Dallas police station. The incident is captured on live television. This was the first murder ever seen on live TV. All of the evidence shows it was a spur of the moment, rash decision (as Ruby later claimed). On Saturday, November 23 the police announced that Ruby would be transferred from the police department to the Dallas County jail on the morning of Sunday, November 24 at 10:00 AM. This announcement allowed the press to be in the basement ready for the photo ops of Oswald being placed into a vehicle for transfer to the county jail. If Ruby had planned on killing Oswald on the morning of November 24, he would have been at the police station before 10:00 AM. Instead, we know he was in his apartment watching TV with his roommate George Senator at that time. That morning Ruby received a phone call from one of his strippers, Karen Bennett a.k.a. Little Lynn. Phone records show that the call was at 10:19 AM. She needed money. Karen Bennett lived in Fort Worth, about 30 miles away from where Ruby lived in Dallas, so he said he would wire her the money through Western Union. Ruby got dressed and drove to the Western Union office and wired her $25. Western Union gave him a timestamped receipt. We know this was an accurate timestamp because all Western Union offices coordinated their clocks with the U.S. Naval Observatory time in Washington D.C. The receipt said 11:17 AM. This was an hour and 17 minutes after Oswald was supposed to have been transferred. If Oswald had been transferred on time (there was delay for some extra questioning) Oswald would have been long gone by the time Ruby got there. When he left the Western Union office Ruby saw a crowd around the Dallas police station which was near the Western Union office. He wandered over, went down the ramp, and entered the crowd of reporters and photographers. A few moments later the police came out of the elevator with Oswald. As Oswald was passing in front of him, Ruby stepped out and shot Oswald in the abdomen. This occurred at 11:21 AM. This was exactly 4 minutes after he wired the money from Western Union. This is proof that it was a spur of the moment, psychotic decision. Oswald died later that day.
November 25
— 1936: Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, an agreement to mutually resist communism and communist states. A year later, Italy also joined. Like all of Hitler’s treaties, this pact proved to be meaningless when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939. Of course, Hitler would break that treaty as well when the Wehrmacht invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in history.
November 26
— 43 BCE: Lex Titia is passed. This Roman law formally created the Second Triumvirate, an alliance of Roman leaders Octavian (later known as Caesar Augustus), Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and Mark Antony. The Senate granted these three men supreme authority for five years. They would remain united until they conquered their enemies who had assassinated Julius Caesar. Once Brutus and Cassius were dead at the Battle of Philippi in eastern Macedonia, the Second Triumvirate slowly fell apart. Eventually, in 31 BCE, Octavian (Caesar Augustus) would emerge as the first Roman Emperor.
November 27
— 1971: Soviet spacecraft Mars 2 becomes the first human-made object to reach the surface of Mars. It was not a successful landing. Mars 2 crashed onto the Martian surface because the landing protocol did not work properly.
November 28
— 1520: Ferdinand Magellan leads his three ships out of the strait which is now named for him into a new (for Europeans) ocean which he names the Pacific because it seemed so calm compared to the Strait of Magellan.
— 1943: Tehran Conference begins with the first meeting of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
November 29
— 1947: United Nations votes for the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel.
— 1929: American explorer Richard Byrd (and three crewmembers) make the first flight over the South Pole.
November 30
— 1939: Start of Soviet-Finnish War, also known as the “Winter War”. It took the USSR over three months of fighting to coerce Finland into signing a peace treaty ceding some territory to the USSR. Soviet losses were serious. This shocked most of the world since the Soviet Union had a population of over 170 million and Finland had less than 4 million people. The Soviets also had an overwhelming advantage in tanks, aircraft, and all military supplies. The fact that the Soviets struggled so much against a small country like Finland led many world leaders to conclude that the Soviet Union was militarily weak. Some believe this contributed to Adolf Hitler’s belief that Nazi Germany could conquer the USSR when the Nazis invaded in June 1941.
— 1874: Winston Churchill born in Oxfordshire, England.
— 2018: Former president George H. W. Bush dies in Houston, Texas.
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December
December 1
— 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama public bus. This is a violation of Montgomery’s segregation laws and she is arrested. The Montgomery Bus Boycott results, raising to prominence Martin Luther King Jr.
— 1959: Antarctica Treaty is signed between 12 nations, including the U.S. and the Soviet Union, banning any military activity or weapons testing in Antarctica.
December 2
— 1804: Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself as Emperor of France in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
— 1805: Battle of Austerlitz. Located in the modern country of the Czech Republic, the battle is considered the greatest tactical triumph by Napoleon Bonaparte. The French army crushes the coalition forces of Austria and Russia.
— 1823: Monroe Doctrine is announced as part of President James Monroe’s annual address to Congress.
— 1859: John Brown, who attempted to create a slave uprising in Virginia, is hanged for treason, murder, and insurrection.
— 1954: Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin is censured by the U.S. Senate for his unsupported investigations into alleged communists which ruined many people’s lives.
December 3
— 1818: Illinois is admitted as the 21st state.
— 1984: Union Carbide leak in Bhopal, India. The worst industrial disaster ever begins when at least 30 tons of methyl isocyanate (a highly toxic gas), as well as a number of other poisonous gases, are released from the pesticide plant. An estimated 15,000 people die over the coming years.
December 4
— 1783: General George Washington meets with his officers from Continental Army to say farewell in the Long Room of Fraunces Tavern, located on the corner of Pearl and Broad streets in lower Manhattan.
December 5
— 1933: The 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, repealing the 18th Amendment and ending prohibition.
— 1782: Future president Martin Van Buren is born in Kinderhook, New York. He is the first president born as an American citizen and not a subject of the British crown. His nickname of “Old Kinderhook” becomes shortened to “OK”. In 1840 his supporters state that “Martin Van Buren is OK”. This is the start of the American idiom “OK”. There are various purported origins for the term OK from before 1840. But the nickname for Martin Van Buren as Old Kinderhook popularizes that term “OK” and makes it become part of common American language.
— 2013: South African president Nelson Mandela dies.
December 6
— 1865: The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, officially abolishing slavery throughout the United States.
— 1921: Anglo-Irish Treaty is signed, creating the Irish Free State. Ireland achieves the status of a Dominion within the British Empire (like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The six counties of Northern Ireland are granted the opportunity to opt out of the Irish Free State and remain part of the United Kingdom. The treaty is narrowly approved by the Dáil Éireann (Irish parliament) on January 7, 1922. This leads to the Irish Civil War in June 1922.
— 1884: The Washington Monument is completed on the Mall in Washington D.C., becoming the tallest building in the world (at the time) at 555 feet, 5.125 inches (169.3 meters). On that date, the man from the Army Corps of Engineers who was in charge of the project, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lincoln Casey, supervised the placement of the 3,300-pound capstone. Casey then placed the 8.9-inch aluminum tip atop the capstone. Inscribed on the aluminum cap are names and dates relating to the monument’s construction. On the east face on the aluminum cap, facing the rising sun, are the words “Laus Deo,” which is Latin for “Praise be to God”.
December 7
— 1941: Japanese planes launched from six aircraft carriers bomb the U.S. Pacific Fleet in a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Although appearing to be very successful, the Japanese leave intact the oil storage depots and repair facilities. Also, none of the U.S. aircraft carriers were present at the time of the attack. These factors allow the U.S. Navy to recover quickly and, by June 1942, the tide turns in the Pacific.
— 1787: Delaware ratifies the U.S. Constitution, becoming the “first state”.
December 8
— 1941: U.S. declares war on Japan. President Franklin Roosevelt delivers his most memorable speech which begins: “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” FDR’s speechwriters were out of town so he had to prepare the speech himself. He dictated a first draft to his secretary. When he read the draft he did not like one part of the first sentence which read: “a date which will live in world history”. He crossed out “world history” and hand wrote “infamy”.
— 1980: John Lennon is shot and killed by Mark David Chapman in Manhattan, New York.
December 9
— 1990: Lech Walesa is elected president in the first free elections in Poland after the fall of communism. As the leader of the Solidarity movement, Walesa was instrumental in ending communist rule in Poland. In 1983, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to resolve Poland’s problems (from the Communist regime) through negotiations without violence.
— 1958: John Birch Society, a right-wing anti-Communist group, is founded in Indianapolis, Indiana.
December 10
— 1898: U.S. and Spain sign the Treaty of Paris ending the Spanish-American War. U.S. Secretary of State John Hay famously described it as “a splendid little war” because it had relatively few casualties, was over quickly, and was a resounding success for the United States. Here is the full quote from a letter that Hay wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt, July 27, 1898: “It has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.”
— 1817: Mississippi is admitted as the 20th state.
December 11
— 1936: King Edward VIII abdicates the British throne ending a governmental crisis over whether he could marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
— 1997: Kyoto Protocol is adopted by the United Nations for the goal of restricting greenhouse gas emissions.
— 1816: Indiana is admitted as the 19th state.
December 12
— 1787: Pennsylvania is the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
— 1963: Kenya achieves independence from the United Kingdom. After World War II the British Empire fell apart as most of the colonies gained their independence.
December 13
— 1937: The Rape of Nanking. Japanese army captures the Chinese capital of Nanking. Japanese General Matsui Iwane orders the annihilation of the city, resulting in approximately 200,000 people murdered, as well as tens of thousands of women and girls raped.
December 14
— 2012: Adam Lanza here shoots and kills 26 people (20 of whom are children under 7 years old) at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
— 1911: Norwegian Roald Amundsen leads the first expedition to reach the South Pole.
— 1799: Former president George Washington dies at Mount Vernon, Virginia.
— 1819: Alabama is admitted as the 22nd state.
December 15
— 1791 The first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, go into effect following ratification by three-fourths of the existing state legislatures.
December 16
— 1773: Boston Tea Party — in an act of protest, American colonists, led by the Sons of Liberty, board three ships (the Beaver, the Dartmouth, and the Eleanor) and dump all of the chests of tea into Boston Harbor. Contrary to popular belief, the Tea Party ships were NOT British. All three ships were built in America and owned by Americans. However, the cargo of tea they were carrying from London to Boston was owned by the British East India Company. The American colonists were protesting the Tea Act of 1773 which granted the British East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. This was another example of the British government in London passing laws, including taxes, affecting the American colonies, but the Americans had no representation in Parliament.
December 17
— 1903: Wright Brothers (Orville and Wilbur) make the first flight in human history of a heavier-than-air powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The flight only lasted 12 seconds, traveled 120 feet (36 meters), and reached a top speed of 6.8 miles (10.9 kilometers) per hour.
December 18
— 2019: President Donald Trump is impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
— 1787: New Jersey is the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
December 19
— 1972: Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon, ends with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. American astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt walked, and even drove a lunar rover, on the Moon, while Ronald Evans orbited above in the command module. This was the last time humans have left Earth’s orbit.
— 1998: President Bill Clinton is impeached for lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstruction of justice.
— 1843: “A Christmas Carol” is first published.
December 20
— 1860: South Carolina becomes the first state to secede from the United States. Ten other slave states will follow, creating the Confederacy and the U.S. Civil War.
December 21
— 1988: Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground, as a result of a bomb planted on board by Islamic terrorists. Thirty-four years later, on November 29, 2022, 71 year old Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi of Tunisia and Libya is finally formally indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury. In November 1991, two Libyan intelligence operatives, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, were arrested for their roles in the bombing. They were tried in a Scottish court sitting in The Netherlands. Fhimah was acquitted. Megrahi was found guilty.
December 22
— 1989: Nicolae Ceausescu is removed from office and captured by armed forces in Romania. He had been the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party since 1965. He was convicted and executed 3 days later on December 25, 1989.
December 23
— 1941: American forces on Wake Island surrender to Japanese. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attack many places throughout Asia and the Pacific, including the small American garrison on Wake Island (approximately 2,000 miles/3200 kilometers west of Hawaii). After a few days of bombing, the Japanese invasion force arrives at Wake Island on December 11. Surprisingly, the small American garrison fends off the much larger attacking force. But the Americans eventually surrender to a larger invasion on December 23. The stout defense by the greatly outnumbered and outgunned American military and civilians of Wake Island give a much needed morale boost throughout the U.S.
December 24
— 1814: Treaty of Ghent ends the War of 1812. It took 6 weeks for the news to travel by sea from Europe to the U.S. That is why the Battle of New Orleans took place on January 8, 1815, where the Americans achieve their greatest land victory over the British in the War of 1812.
— 1979: Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. This leads to the U.S. boycotting the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.
December 25
— 1914: Christmas Truce. On the Western Front of WWI, German soldiers emerge from their trenches into no-man’s land shouting Happy Christmas in English and French. Allied troops join the Germans and exchange Christmas greetings and some even play games of soccer. The killing resumes the next day.
December 26
— 1972: Former president Harry S. Truman dies in Kansas City, Missouri.
— 2006: Former president Gerald Ford dies in Rancho Mirage, California.
— 1946: Bugsy Siegel opens Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Although the opening is a temporary failure, the Flamingo begins modern Las Vegas.
December 27
— 1932: Radio City Music Hall opens in New York City.
December 28
— 1832: John C. Calhoun becomes the first U.S. vice president to resign from office.
— 1973: Endangered Species Act signed into law by President Richard Nixon.
— 1846: Iowa is admitted as the 29th state.
— 1856: Future president Woodrow Wilson is born in Staunton, Virginia.
December 29
— 1890: Wounded Knee massacre. U.S. Army soldiers kill at least 300 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
— 1845: Texas is admitted as the 28th state.
— 1808: Future president Andrew Johnson is born in Raleigh, North Carolina.
December 30
— 1922: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is established.
December 31
— 1904: First New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square, New York City. The ball drop did not begin until New Year’s Eve 1907.
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