On This Day in History

[death tribble]

 

 

 

 

• 1944 

  Thousands of Allied troops invaded the beaches of Normandy, France, on D-Day. 

 

And thousands of German troops voided their bowels.

[GhostDancer]

• 1215 

  King John sealed the Magna Carta. 

• 1775 

  George Washington was appointed head of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress. 

• 1836 

  Arkansas became the 25th state in the United States. 

• 1844 

  Charles Goodyear was granted a patent for rubber vulcanization. 

• 1849 

  James Polk, the 11th president of the United States, died in Nashville, Tennessee. 

• 1923 

  Lou Gehrig made his New York Yankee debut as a pinch runner. 

• 1992 

  Vice President Dan Quayle's "potatoe" spelling incident. 

• 1996 

  Ella Fitzgerald, the ''first lady of song,'' died in Beverly Hills, California. 

• 2002 

  Rolling Stone Mick Jagger was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.

[GhostDancer]

• 1815 

  Napoleon abdicated his throne for the second time after his defeat at Waterloo. 

• 1870 

  The U.S. Justice Department was created. 

• 1874 

  Dr. Andrew Still became the first to practice osteopathy. 

• 1943 

  W.E.B. DuBois became the first black member of the National Institute of Letters. 

• 1944 

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill of Rights. 

• 1969 

  Singer-actress Judy Garland died. 

• 1987 

  Actor-dancer-singer Fred Astaire died. 

• 2011 

   

  Legendary Boston crime boss,James "Whitey" Bulger is found and arrested by federal authorities in Santa Monica, Calif.

   

   

[GhostDancer]

• 1868 

  Christopher Latham Sholes received a patent for an invention he called a ''Type-Writer.'' 

• 1947 

  The Senate overrode President Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act. 

• 1969 

  Warren Burger was sworn in as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. 

• 1972 

  Richard Nixon and H. R. Haldeman discussed ways to obstruct the FBI's Watergate investigation. Revelation of this conversation spurred on Nixon's 1974 resignation. 

• 1992 

  Mobster John Gotti was sentenced to life in prison. 

• 1995 

  Dr. Jonas Salk, the medical pioneer who developed the first polio vaccine, died. 

• 2003 

  The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan's School of Law affirmative action policy.

[GhostDancer]

• 1890 

  Wyoming became the 44th state in the United States. 

• 1940 

  The Battle of Britain began. 

• 1951 

  Armistice talks to end the Korean War began at Kaesong. 

• 1973 

  The Bahamas became independent from Great Britain. 

• 1985 

  The Coca-Cola Company announced that it was bringing back the original Coke and calling it Coca-Cola Classic. 

• 1989 

  Mel Blanc, the “man of a thousand voices,” including such cartoon characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig, died in Los Angeles. 

• 1991 

  Boris Yeltsin was sworn in as Russia's first elected president. 

• 1995 

  Myanmar activist Aung San Suu Kyi was released after six years of house arrest. 

• 2003 

  Spain opened its first mosque (in Granada) since the Moors were expelled in 1492.

• 2007 

• Traffic conditions claimed the life of a prominent newspaper comics cartoonist. Doug Marlette, creator of The Chicago Tribune's Kudzu, Shoe, and Mother Goose & Grimm, was killed at 57 in a car accident.

[GhostDancer]

• 1533 

  Pope Clement VII excommunicated England's King Henry VIII. 

• 1804 

  Former vice president Aaron Burr fatally wounded former secretary of the treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Hamilton died the following afternoon. 

• 1864 

  Confederate general Jubal A. Early and his troops attacked Washington, DC. They retreated the next day, ending the Confederate threat to occupy the capital. 

• 1914 

  Babe Ruth made his major league baseball debut as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.

• 1923 

• One of the more prominent continuers of another cartoonist's comic strip was born; Dan Barry, who handled the Flash Gordon feature for King Features for nearly 40 years.

•  

• 1977 

  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work to advance civil rights. 

• 1989 

  Actor Laurence Olivier died. 

• 1995 

  The United States and Vietnam established full diplomatic relations. 

• 2011 

  The News of the World, a British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, closes after several allegations that the paper's journalists hacked into voicemail accounts belonging to not only a 13-year-old murder victim, but also the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

•  

•  

[GhostDancer]

• 1810 

  Colombia declared independence from Spain. 

• 1881 

  Fugitive Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull surrendered to federal troops. 

• 1941 

Disney released the first (unless you count Fantasia) of its compilation features — those '40s flicks that didn't tell a single coherent story, but were more like Silly Symphony collections; The Reluctant Dragon.

 

 

• 1951 

  King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated. 

• 1960 

  Sirima Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) became the world's first woman prime minister. 

• 1969 

  Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon. 

• 1985 

  Treasure hunters found the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank off the coast of Key West, Fla., in 1622 during a hurricane. The ship contained over $400 million in coins and silver ingots.

[Cancer]

Also, 1976: The Viking 1 spacecraft touched down on Mars, becoming the first fully successful soft lander on the Red Planet after several failures. (The Soviet Mars 3 lander did succeed in a soft landing a few years before, but contact was lost about 15 seconds after landing.) The Viking 1 lander operated well into 1982, more than 2200 sols (Martian days).

[Doc Shadow]

 

• 1969 

  Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon. 

 

I watched this live on TV 48 years ago.   How many of you old farts did as well?

[Cancer]

I did not see it: I was at Boy Scout camp, in Camp Freedom, Germany. It happened in the wee hours local time, and I was asleep in my tent. A small contingent had been permitted to have their sleeping bags in the chow hall where a TV had been brought in for that night, but I was not among them.

 

My brother missed it also. He was doped to the gills in Rhein-Main Army Hospital being treated for a compound fracture he'd suffered not quite a week before.

[GhostDancer]

I watched this live on TV 48 years ago.   How many of you old farts did as well?

 

Yes, I am that old, and saw this on live TV.  I deny being old enough to have experienced everything I post.

[GhostDancer]

• 1701
• Detroit is founded by by the French explorer and adventurer Antoine de Lamothe-Cadillac and a party of settlers.  It is the largest city on the United States - Canadian border.
• 1847 

  Brigham Young and the first members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) arrived at the Great Salt Lake. 

• 1862 

  Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, died in Kinderhook, N.Y. 

• 1866 

  Tennessee became the first Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union. 

• 1931 
• A minor mystery was cleared up in Thimble Theatre, the King Features comic where Popeye is the star, The source of the one-eyed sailor's strength was revealed to be spinach
• 1937 

  Charges against five black men accused of raping two white women in the Scottsboro case were dropped.

• 1970 

• The creator of Dennis the Menace ended his association with his brainchild. David Law (who also created Beryl the Peril) did his final episode in the issue of The Beano.

•  

  • 1974 

    The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon had to turn over White House tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor. 

  • 2002 

    Nine coal miners were trapped in a mine in Pennsylvania. All were rescued three days later.

     

[Cancer]

On this day in 1976 ... NASA released the famous Face On Mars image, taken from Viking 1 orbiter, source of so many jokes and conspiracy theories. The linked page shows subsequently-taken images of the same geological feature on Mars.

[GhostDancer]

1701

The mothership for all Catholics in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Ste. Anne de Detroit parish is the second oldest parish in continuous operation in the United States. The present structure is the eighth building constructed for the parish and contains the oldest stained glass windows in the city.

 

 

• 1788 

  New York became the 11th state in the United States. 

• 1847 

  Liberia became Africa's first republic. 

• 1908 

  The Office of the Chief Examiner, which in 1935 became the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was created.

• 1910

• A classic comics gag — so classic, it once appeared on a U.S. postage stamp — made its debut in George Herriman's The Dingbat Family. Ignatz Mouse hurled his first brick at Krazy Kat.

•  

• 1947 

  President Harry S Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

• 1952 

  Argentina's first lady, Eva Peron, died in Buenos Aires at age 33. 

• 1953 

  Fidel Castro was among a group of rebelling anti-Batistas who unsuccessfully attacked an army barracks.

   

[GhostDancer]

 

• 1790 

  The first U.S. census was completed, showing a population of 3,929,214 people. 

• 1876 

  Colorado became the 38th state in the United States.

1910

A famous newspaper comic assumed the name by which we know it best. George Herriman's The Dingbat Family, where Krazy Kat was first seen, became The Family Upstairs.
 

• 1936 

  Adolf Hitler presided over the opening of the Berlin Olympic Games. 

• 1946 

  President Truman signed the congressional acts that established the Atomic Energy Commission and the Fulbright Scholarship program. 

• 1981 

  MTV made its debut at 12:01 AM. The first video shown was Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles.

[GhostDancer]

• 
• 1492 

• Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain. 

• 1908

• Allensworth, California was cofounded by ALLEN ALLENSWORTH, an escaped slave who became the first Black Man to rise to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army; among many other accomplishments.

• 1914 

  Germany declared war on France. 

• 1923 

  Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as the 30th president of the United States, following the death of Warren G. Harding. 

• 1949 

  The National Basketball Association was formed. 

• 1958 

  The nuclear-powered submarmine Nautilus became the first vessel to cross the North Pole underwater. 

• 1981 

  U.S. air traffic controllers went on strike. 

• 1987 

  The Iran-Contra hearings ended.

• 1990 

The title character of a syndicated comic strip was shot to death right in front of readers. John Darling was murdered in the second-last episode of his own comic. The final episode was about his funeral.

[GhostDancer]

• 
• 1735 

  Printer John Peter Zenger, defended by Andrew Hamilton, was acquitted of libel in a case that helped foster freedom of the press.

1790

The United States Coast Guard is formed by Congress at the request of Alexander Hamilton as the Revenue Marine.  It is the oldest continuous seagoing service of the United States.

 

 

• 1884 

  Thomas Stevens became the first person to bicycle across the United States. He later bicycled around the world. 

• 1892 

  Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother were killed with an axe in Fall River, Mass.

• 1914 

  Germany invaded Belgium and, in response, Britain declared war on Germany. 

• 1916 

  Denmark ceded the Danish West Indies, including the Danish Virgin Islands, to the United States for $25 million. 

• 1942 
• One of the leaders in the preservation of old newspaper comics entered the world; Rick Norwood, publisher of Comics Revue.
• 1944 

  Anne Frank and her family were found hiding in Amsterdam by Nazis. 

• 1964 

  The bodies of three civil-rights workers were found in an earthen dam, six weeks into a federal investigation backed by President Johnson 

• 1977 

  President Carter signed a congressional act that established the Department of Energy.

[Sundog]

I watched this live on TV 48 years ago.   How many of you old farts did as well?

 

So I'm told. I was only a few months old at the time.

[death tribble]

Today's the day Enola Gay dropped the first A-Bomb on Hiroshima.

[Sundog]

Second A-Bomb. They'd already tested the first one at Trinity.

[death tribble]

That one was exploded in place, the first drop was Hiroshima

[death tribble]

Elvis Presley died 40 years ago today.

[Cancer]

Elvis Presley died 40 years ago today.

I was on the northbound on-ramp from Mercer Street onto Interstate 5 here in Seattle when I heard about it on the radio.

 

That's assuming, of course, the aliens aren't holding his brain hostage on planet zort, as asserted in a Berke Breathed comic once.

[Nolgroth]

I heard he had some weird hip gyration injury that landed him in a nursing home, where he and a fellow resident fought off a mummy.

[death tribble]

100 years ago today Mata Hari was executed as a spy by the French