Tag: History

April 28 Coal mine collapses at Eccles, W.Va., and kills 181 workers. – 1914. One-hundred nineteen die in Benwood, W.Va. coal mine disaster. – 1924. Boxing champion Muhammad Ali refuses to be inducted into the U.S. Army and is immediately stripped of his heavyweight title. Ali, a Muslim, cited religious...

April 21 According to tradition, April 21, 753 B.C., Romulus and his twin brother, Remus, found Rome on the site where they were suckled by a she-wolf as orphaned infants. Actually, the Romulus and Remus myth originated some time in the Fourth Century B.C., and the exact date of Rome’s...

April 14 U.S. president Abraham Lincoln is shot at a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army, to effectively end the American Civil War. – 1865. In what came to be known as Black Sunday,...

April 7 Rwandan armed forces kill 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers in a successful effort to discourage international intervention in the genocide that had begun only hours earlier. In approximately three months, the Hutu extremists who controlled Rwanda brutally murdered an estimated 500,000 to one million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate...

March 31 President Martin Van Buren issues a broadly-applicable executive order granting the 10-hour day to all government employees engaged in manual labor. – 1840. The Eiffel Tower is dedicated in Paris in a ceremony presided over by Gustave Eiffel, the tower’s designer, and attended by Pierre Tirard, French prime...

March 24 Groundbreaking on the first section of the New York City subway system, from City Hall to the Bronx: According to The New York Times, the following was a worker’s review of the digging style of the well-dressed Subway Commissioners: “I wouldn’t give th’ Commish’ners foive cents a day...

March 17 In New York City, the first parade honoring the Catholic feast day of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, is held by Irish soldiers serving in the British army. – 1762. The leadership of the American Federation of Labor selects the carpenters union to lead the eight-hour...

March 10 The first discernible speech is transmitted over a telephone system when inventor Alexander Graham Bell summons his assistant in another room by saying, “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.” Bell had received a comprehensive telephone patent just three days earlier. – 1876. A devastating mine disaster kills...

March 3 Anne Sullivan begins teaching six-year-old Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing after a severe illness at the age of 19 months. Under Sullivan’s tutelage, including her pioneering “touch teaching” techniques, the previously uncontrollable Keller flourished, and eventually was graduated from college to become an international lecturer...

February 24 The U.S. House of Representatives votes 11 articles of impeachment against president Andrew Johnson, nine of which cite Johnson’s removal of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The House vote made president Johnson the first president to be impeached in...

February 17 Approximately 900 persons drown when a passenger ferry, the Neptune, overturns near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The ferry was dangerously overloaded, and carried no lifeboats or emergency gear. – 1993. February 18 A man ignites a gasoline-filled container inside a subway train in Daegu, South Korea. The blaze engulfes the...

February 10 After three hours, world chess champion Gary Kasparov loses the first game of a six-game match against Deep Blue, an IBM computer capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second. Man was ultimately victorious over machine, however, when Kasparov defeated Deep Blue in the match with three wins...

February 3 U.S. Supreme Court upholds the Wages and Hours, later Fair Labor Standards Act, which bans child labor and establishes the 40-hour work-week. – 1941. Rising American rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson are killed when their chartered Beechcraft Bonanza plane crashes in...

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...

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...

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...