Category: History

December 19 After nearly 14 hours of debate, the House of Representatives approves two articles of impeachment against president Bill Clinton and charges him with lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. Clinton, the second president in American history to be impeached, vows to finish his...

December 12 More than two years after it was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Mona Lisa is recovered inside Italian waiter Vincenzo Peruggia’s hotel room in Florence. Peruggia previously had worked at the Louvre and had participated in the heist with a group...

December 5 A fire at the Brooklyn Theater in New York City kills nearly 300 individuals and injures hundreds more. Some victims perished from a combination of burns and smoke inhalation; others were trampled to death in the general panic that ensued. – 1876. The 21st Amendment to the U.S....

November 28 After sailing through the dangerous straits below South America, that now bear his name, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan enters the Pacific Ocean with three ships to become the first European explorer to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic. – 1520. Frank Duryea wins the first motor-car race in...

November 21 The American inventor Thomas A. Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a way to record and play back sound. – 1877. A Senate committee issues a report charging that U.S. government officials were behind assassination plots against two foreign leaders and were heavily involved in at least...

November 14 In Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, the religious leader Sheikh-ul-Islam declares an Islamic holy war on behalf of the Ottoman government and urges his Muslim followers to take up arms against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, and Montenegro in World War I. – 1914. The Depression-era Public Works...

November 7 U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected to an unprecedented fourth term in office. FDR remains the only president to have served more than two terms. – 1944. November 8 U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt announces plans for the Civil Works Administration to create four million additional jobs...

October 31 The priest and scholar Martin Luther approaches the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nails a piece of paper to it containing the 95 revolutionary opinions that would begin the Protestant Reformation. In his theses, Luther condemned the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic...

October 24 A 63-year-old schoolteacher, Annie Edson Taylor, becomes the first known person to take the plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel. – 1901. The first U.S. federal minimum wage, 25¢ an hour, takes effect, thanks to enactment of the Depression-era Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA). The law required...