Today in History

Today in History

1797 – 'Old Ironsides,' the U.S. Navy frigate Constitution, was launched in Boston's harbor.

1805 – The Battle of Trafalgar occurred off the coast of Spain. The British defeated the French and Spanish fleet.

1849 – The first tattooed man, James F. O’Connell, was put on exhibition at the Franklin Theatre in New York City, NY.

1858 – The Can-Can was performed for the first time in Paris.

1879 – Thomas Edison invented the electric incandescent lamp. It would last 13 1/2 hours before it would burn out.

1917 – The first U.S. soldiers entered combat during World War I near Nancy, France.

1918 – Margaret Owen set a typing speed record of 170 words per minute on a manual typewriter.

1925 – The photoelectric cell was first demonstrated at the Electric Show in New York City, NY.

1925 – The U.S. Treasury Department announced that it had fined 29,620 people for prohibition (of alcohol) violations.

1927 – In New York City, construction began on the George Washington Bridge.

1944 – During World War II, the German city of Aachen was captured by U.S. troops.

1945 – Women in France were allowed to vote for the first time.

1950 – Chinese forces invaded Tibet.

1959 – The Guggenheim Museum was opened to the public in New York. The building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

1967 – Thousands of demonstrators marched in Washington, DC, in opposition to the Vietnam War.

1980 – The Philadelphia Phillies won their first World Series.

1983 – The Pentagon reported that 2,000 Marines were headed to Grenada to protect and evacuate Americans living there.

1986 – The U.S. ordered 55 Soviet diplomats to leave. The action was in reaction to the Soviet Union expelling five American diplomats.

1991 – Jesse Turner, an American hostage in Lebanon, was released after nearly five years of being imprisoned.

1993 – The play 'The Twilight of the Golds' opened.

1994 – North Korea and the U.S. signed an agreement requiring North Korea to halt its nuclear program and agree to inspections.

1998 – The New York Yankees set a major league baseball record of 125 victories for the regular and postseason combined.

1998 – Cancer specialist Dr. Jane Henney became the FDA's first female commissioner.

2003 – North Korea rejected U.S. President George W. Bush's offer of a written pledge not to attack in exchange for the communist nation agreeing to end its nuclear weapons program.

Born

1760 Katsushika Hokusai, Japanese print-maker.

1772 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan”).

1833 Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Prizes.

1917 Dizzy Gillespie, jazz trumpeter.

1929 Ursula K. Le Guin, science fiction writer (The Left Hand of Darkness)

History