Category: History

June 15 Arkansas becomes the 25th state to join the United States. – 1836 More than 1,000 individuals taking a pleasure trip on New York City’s East River on the riverboat-style steamer General Slocum, are drowned, or burned to death, when a fire sweeps through the boat. It was one...

June 8 Some 35,000 members of the Machinists union begin what is to become a 43-day strike, the largest in airline history, against five carriers. The mechanics and other ground service workers wanted to share in the airlines’ substantial profits. – 1966. During the Six-Day War, Israeli aircraft and torpedo...

June 1 Approximately 12,500 longshoremen strike the Pacific Coast, from San Diego, Calif. to Bellingham, Wash.. – 1916. A Warsaw Poland underground newspaper, the Liberty Brigade, makes public the news of the gassing of tens of thousands of Jews at Chelmno, a death camp in Poland. – 1942. A coal...

May 25 With George Washington presiding, the Constitutional Convention formally convenes on this day in 1787. The convention faced a daunting task: The peaceful overthrow of the new American government as it had been defined by the Articles of Confederation. – 1787. Thousands of unemployed WWI veterans arrive in Washington,...

May 18 In what may have been baseball’s first labor strike, the Detroit Tigers refuse to play after team leader Ty Cobb is suspended: He went into the stands and beat a fan who had been heckling him. Cobb was reinstated and the Tigers went back to work after the...

May 11 Nationwide railway strike begins in Pullman, Ill. and 260,000 railroad workers ultimately joined the strike to protest wage cuts by the Pullman Palace Car Co.. – 1894. A massive storm sends millions of tons of topsoil flying from across the parched Great Plains region of the United States...

May 4 Haymarket massacre. A bomb is thrown when Chicago police start to break up a rally for strikers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. A riot erupts, and 11 police and strikers die, mostly from gunfire, and scores more are injured. – 1886. In Kent, Ohio, 28 National Guardsmen...

April 27 After going three-quarters of the way around the globe, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan is killed during a tribal skirmish on Mactan Island in the Philippines. Magellan was hit by a poisoned arrow and left to die by his retreating comrades. – 1521. Afghanistan president Sardar Mohammed Daoud is...

April 20 The Fidel Castro regime announces that all Cubans seeking to emigrate to the U.S. are free to board boats at the port of Mariel, west of Havana and launched the Mariel Boatlift. The first of 125,000 Cuban refugees from Mariel reached Florida the next day. – 1980. Ludlow...

April 13 Disaster strikes 200,000 miles from Earth when oxygen tank No. 2 blows up on Apollo 13, the third manned lunar landing mission. Astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise had left Earth two days earlier for the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon, but...