January 27 Mine explosion in Mount Pleasant, Pa. leaves more than 100 dead. – 1891. The 8th U.S. Air Force bombers, dispatched from England, fly the first American bombing raid against Germany and make its target the Wilhelmshaven port. – 1943. Soviet forces permanently break the Leningrad siege line to
January 20 During the First Opium War, China cedes the island of Hong Kong to the British with the signing of the Chuenpi Convention, an agreement seeking an end to the first Anglo-Chinese conflict. – 1841. U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the only president to be elected to four terms
A fire broke out January 10, 1934 which destroyed the Woolworth Store in Aurora, 19-21 South Broadway.
My maternal cousin, Tom O’Brien, is a master historian and genealogist who literally has traveled the world in search of facts and photographs, particularly of the Litterst family. He and his wife have travelled extensively. Tom and his French wife, Marguerite, raised two sons and live in the Portland, Oregon
January 13 Pope Honorius II grants a papal sanction to the military order known as the Knights Templar, declaring it to be an army of God. – 1128. January 14 The theologian, musician, philosopher, and Nobel Prize-winning physician Albert Schweitzer is born on this day in 1875 in Upper-Alsace, Germany,
January 6 Samuel Morse’s telegraph system is demonstrated for the first time at the Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, N.J.. The telegraph, a device which used electric impulses to transmit encoded messages over a wire, eventually would revolutionize long-distance communication, and reach the height of its popularity in the 1920s
Today is 05 Marx 53 ASE. Many years ago, I created a new calendar to replace the grossly-erroneous Christian calendar of Pope Gregory XIII. The Gregorian calendar was based upon religious precepts rather than upon astronomical observations. Consequently, it did not serve a multi-ethnic population which existed on Planet Earth,
December 30 In post-revolutionary Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is established, which comprises a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation, divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics. Known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the
December 23 Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, suffering from severe depression, cuts off the lower part of his left ear. During his lifetime, he was a poster boy for tortured, starving, artists, and sold only one painting. – 1888. In Tokyo, Japan, Hideki Tojo, former Japanese premier and chief of
December 16 In Boston Harbor, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships and dump 342 chests of tea into the harbor. The midnight raid, popularly known as the “Boston Tea Party,” was in protest of the British Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773, a
December 9 On this day, 1,800 United States Marines arrive in Mogadishu, Somalia, to spearhead a multinational force aimed at restoring order in the conflict-ridden country. – 1992. December 10 The first Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. –
December 2 The Enron Corporation files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a New York City court to spark one of the largest corporate scandals in the U.S.. Enron’s collapse cost investors billions of dollars, wiped out approximately 5,600 jobs, and liquidated almost $2.1 billion in pension plans. – 2001.
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us.” — Jane Addams Elizabeth, the child, passed the night and went straight into her Heavenly Father’s arms. She died of malnutrition in the tenements of New York City, 1910. She left four
November 25 The so-called “storm of the century” hits the eastern part of the United States and kills hundreds and causes millions of dollars in damages. Some areas were blanketed with several feet of snow for several days and travel was impossible for nearly a week in some places. The
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” —Declaration of Independence The story about women’s suffrage begins with Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Susan B. Anthony did get the education she wanted, but then she was forbidden to speak in public against slavery. •
November 18 At exactly noon on this day, American and Canadian railroads begin using four continental time zones to end the confusion of dealing with thousands of local times. The bold move was emblematic of the power shared by the railroad companies. – 1883. Thirty-one men die on Lake Michigan
November 11 At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ends. At 5 a.m., Germany, bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. The First
November 4 British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discover a step leading to the tomb of King Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. – 1922. A spontaneous national uprising that began 12 days earlier in Hungary is viciously crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on this
October 28 The Statue of Liberty, a gift of friendship from France to the United States, is dedicated in New York Harbor, N.Y. by U.S. president Grover Cleveland. – 1886. The Cuban Missile crisis comes to a close when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agrees to remove Russian missiles from Cuba
Listen. It was the year 1818. The unshorn fields were boundless and beautiful. The prairies and the sights took all into the encircling vastness, wrote the poet Uo. The topography of DeKalb’s verdant terrain made possible a rich agriculture, the fur trade, and the tide of immigrants to build the
