On this day in history - Federal News Network https://federalnewsnetwork.com Helping feds meet their mission. Tue, 12 May 2020 11:55:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://federalnewsnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/cropped-icon-512x512-1-60x60.png On this day in history - Federal News Network https://federalnewsnetwork.com 32 32 1978: NOAA announces gender-neutral hurricane naming system https://federalnewsnetwork.com/us-government-history/2020/05/day-u-s-government-history/ https://federalnewsnetwork.com/us-government-history/2020/05/day-u-s-government-history/#comments Tue, 12 May 2020 10:00:53 +0000 http://federalnewsradio.com/?p=955290 Federal News Network presents a daily update of important moments in the history of the U.S. government.

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When Juanita Kreps became the first female secretary of Commerce in 1977, it was a time of increased inclusion of women in the workplace and a national shift in cultural norms around women not only joining male-dominated industries but also leading. Once at Commerce, she focused the debate around hurricane naming, which began in 1973 and resurfaced in 1975 when Australia decided to switch to alternating male-female names for tropical cyclones and other storms rather than only female names. Few feminists gave the move much attention but Kreps directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to follow the model. The National Hurricane Center had already ceded to the World Meteorological Organization for global tropical storm naming, and the WMO argued it was too late to make changes for the 1978 but could do so in 1979. Kreps was unsatisfied, and so the National Weather Service worked out a deal with Mexico to change the naming system for the Eastern Pacific Region of the U.S. for the 1978 interim. The deal was announced May 12, 1978.

(“Tempest: Hurricane Naming and American Culture”)

The Pentagon Papers were a Defense Department history of the U.S.’ political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, which revealed the U.S. had secretly enlarged the scope of its actions in the Vietnam War and that multiple presidential administrations had misled Congress and the public about such actions. Daniel Ellsberg had worked on the study and, along with researcher Anthony Russo, photocopied and shared them with the The New York Times in 1971. For his disclosure of the report, Ellsberg was initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property. He was indicted by a grand jury on charges of stealing and holding secret documents. But Federal District Judge William Matthew Byrne, Jr. declared a mistrial and dismissed all charges against Ellsberg and Russo on May 11, 1973, after it was revealed that agents acting on the orders of the Nixon administration illegally broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and attempted to steal files. Representatives of the Nixon administration also approached the Ellsberg trial judge with an offer of the job of FBI directorship, and there were several irregularities in the government’s case including its claim that it had lost records of illegal wiretapping against Ellsberg. Therefore, Byrne ruled government misconduct had mired the prosecution’s case. However, Ellsberg and Russo were not acquitted of violating the Espionage Act.

(Wikipedia)

On this day in 1945, Great Britain and the U.S. celebrated Victory in Europe (V-E) Day. Cities in both nations, as well as formerly Nazi-occupied cities in Western Europe, put out flags and banners rejoicing Germany’s defeat during World War II. On May 8, German troops throughout Europe laid down their arms: In Prague, Copenhagen, Oslo, Karlshorst near Berlin, Latvia, and on the Channel Island of Sark. More surrender documents were signed in Berlin and in eastern Germany. Meanwhile, more than 13,000 British POWs were released and sent back to Great Britain. Although pockets of German-Soviet confrontation lasted until May 9.

(History.com)

The 27th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was first proposed in 1789, and stipulated that, “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.” It meant that members of Congress could not raise or lower their salaries mid-term, and was referred to as the “compensation amendment.” The Constitutional Convention had previously decided that Congress would set its own pay rate, but future president James Madison and other critics said that created potential for political misconduct. The amendment failed to win a three-fourths majority of the states and would occasionally reappear over the next 200 years. Then in 1982, a student at the University of Texas at Austin named Gregory Watson wrote a term paper asserting the amendment could still be ratified. He started a campaign to see it done and had a breakthrough with Maine’s approval in 1983. By 1990 nearly 20 other stated joined in and finally, on May 7, 1992, Michigan became the 38th and last needed state to ratify the 27th Amendment.

On this day in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration. The WPA was one of many Great Depression relief programs created under the auspices of the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act. The WPA, the Public Works Administration and other federal assistance programs put unemployed Americans to work in return for temporary financial assistance. Out of the 10 million jobless men in the United States in 1935, 3 million were helped by WPA jobs alone. Jobs ranged from building highways, schools, hospitals, airports and playgrounds, to restored theaters. The WPA also built the ski lodge at Oregon’s Mt. Hood, hired actors, writers and other creative arts professionals for federally funded plays and art projects, such as murals on public buildings, and literary publications. The ecnoomy had rebounded by 1940 and by 1943 Congress suspended the WPA and many other ERA Act programs.

(History.com)

 

NASA was established in 1958 to keep U.S. space efforts abreast of recent Soviet achievements, starting with the world’s first artificial satellite: Sputnik 1 in 1957. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet space program won the race when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space, put in orbit around the planet, and safely returned to Earth. One month later, Navy Commander Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the the Freedom 7 space capsule. The flight lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, making Shepard the first American astronaut to travel into space.

(History.com)

On May 2, 1970, National Guard troops were called to Kent State University in Ohio to suppress students rioting in protest of the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. The next day, scattered protests were dispersed by tear gas, and on May 4 class resumed at the school. By noon that day, about 2,000 people defied a ban on rallies and assembled on the campus. Guard troops arrived and ordered the crowd to disperse, fired tear gas, and advanced against the students with bayonets on their rifles. Some protesters threw rocks and verbally taunted the troops. Minutes later, without firing a warning shot, the Guardsmen discharged more than 60 rounds toward a group of demonstrators in a nearby parking lot, killing four and wounding nine from between 20 and 250 yards away. Students gathered on a nearby slope and were again ordered to move by the Guardsmen. Faculty members convinced the group to disperse. In 1974, after a criminal investigation, a federal court dropped all charges levied against eight Guardsmen for their role in the deaths.

(History.com)

An American U-2 spy plane was shot down while conducting espionage over the Soviet Union on this day in 1960. The incident derailed an important summit meeting between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that was scheduled for later that month. The U-2 spy plane was developed by the CIA and could take high-resolution pictures of headlines in Russian newspapers as it flew overhead. The CIA assured Eisenhower that the Soviets did not possess weapons sophisticated enough to shoot down the high-altitude planes but on May 1, a U-2 flight piloted by Francis Gary Powers disappeared while on a flight over Russia. The spy agency reassured the president that the plane was equipped with self-destruct mechanisms to render any wreckage unrecognizable and the pilot was instructed to kill himself in such a situation. But Khrushchev produced mostly-intact wreckage of the U-2 and the captured pilot alive, forcing Eisenhower to publicly admit that it was indeed a US spy plane.

(History.com)

On this day in 1803, the United States and France concluded negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of America’s boundaries. What was known as Louisiana Territory comprised most of the continental modern-day U.S. between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, with the exceptions of Texas, parts of New Mexico, and other pockets of land already controlled by the U.S. The territory had transferred hands between France, Spain and Britain throughout the 18th century. Meanwhile, America’s westward expansion increased and when Spain signed a secret treaty with France to return Louisiana Territory in 1801, U.S. leaders were nervous about maintaining access to the Mississippi River and port of New Orleans. So the young nation negotiated a purchase of 828,000 square miles for about $15 million. A formal treaty for the Louisiana Purchase, antedated to April 30, was signed two days later.

(History.com)

On April 29, 2004, the World War II Memorial opened in Washington, D.C., to recognize the 16 million U.S. men and women who served in the war. The memorial is located on 7.4 acres on the former site of the Rainbow Pool at the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The granite and bronze monument features fountains between arches symbolizing hostilities in Europe and the Far East. The arches are flanked by semicircles of pillars, one each for the states, territories and the District of Columbia. A curved wall of 4,000 gold stars represents one of every 100 Americans killed in the war. Though the federal government donated $16 million to the memorial fund, it took more than $164 million in private donations to get it built. Four million World War II veterans were living at the time, with more than 1,100 dying every day, according to government records.

(History.com)

On April 28, 1967, Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the Army, citing religious reasons, and was immediately stripped of his heavyweight boxing title. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., Ali changed his name in 1964 after converting to Islam. He scored a gold medal at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome and made his professional boxing debut against Tunney Husaker on October 29, 1960, winning the bout in six rounds. On February 25, 1964, he defeated the heavily favored bruiser Sonny Liston in six rounds to become heavyweight champ. With the U.S. at war in Vietnam, Ali refused to be inducted into the armed forces, saying “I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong.” On June 20 he  was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to five years in prison, fined $10,000 and banned from boxing for three years. He stayed out of prison as his case was appealed and returned to the ring on Oct. 26, 1970. On June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction for evading the draft.

(History.com)

The First Barbary War began in 1801 when President Thomas Jefferson ordered Navy vessels to the Mediterranean Sea in protest of continuing raids against US ships by pirates from the Barbary states – Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripolitania. American sailors were often abducted and ransomed back to the U.S. and after two years of minor confrontations, sustained action began in June 1803, when a small U.S. expeditionary force attacked Tripoli harbor in present-day Libya. On April 27, 1805, the Derna campaign, which was undertaken by U.S. land forces in North Africa and supported by two Navy ships, Marines and Arab mercenaries under William Eaton, captured the city and deposed the Pasha Yusuf Karamanli. Lt. Presley O’ Bannon’s performance earned him a decorated sword from Hamet Karamanli – the previously deposed brother of Yusuf – which today is the pattern for the swords carried by Marine officers. The phrase “to the shores of Tripoli,”in the official song of the U.S. Marine Corps, was inspired by the Derna campaign.

(History.com)

On this day in 1800, President John Adams approved the appropriation of $5,000 for the purchase of “such books as may be necessary for the use of congress.” The books were the first purchased for the Library of Congress, came from London and arrived in 1801. The collection of 740 volumes and three maps was stored in the U.S. Capitol and on Jan. 26, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson approved the first legislation that defined the role and functions of the new institution. It is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the research arm of Congress. “The Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people, and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations,” according to its website. As of 2018, the Library had more than 168 million items.

(Library of Congress)

The first documented case of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in the U.S. was in June 1981 and the first patient was seen at the National Institutes of Health. By August the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reported 108 cases of the new disease. In the fall two NIH research primates were found to have simian AIDS. Little more than a year later the CDC reported 593 cases in the U.S., with a disproportionate number of infections among homosexual men, hemophiliacs, intravenous drug users and people of ethnic minorities particularly African Americans and Latinos. Then in December 1982 the first case of AIDS contracted by a healthy infant via blood transfusion was reported, followed a monthly later by cases in heterosexual female partners of infected men. For the next 15 months various NIH organizations, clinicians and researchers formed task groups and conducted studies of the disease, all while the number of cases – and deaths – rose exponentially. On April 23, 1984, HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler announced that Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute had found the cause of AIDS: the retrovirus HTLV-III.

(Department of Health and Human Services)

Sen. Joseph McCarthy began his crusade against suspected communist sympathizers in 1950 when he charged that there were more than 200 “known communists” in the State Department. He became one of the most famous and feared members of Congress and manipulated the national media into a state of frenzy around exposing alleged communists with an array of accusations. By 1954 his effect was shifting to a liability. He alleged the U.S. Army was soft on communism and the Government Operations Committee in the Senate began televised hearings. They proved ill-advised as the American public was finally able to see McCarthy’s bluster and bullying tactics first-hand. No charges were upheld against Army officials and in December  that year the Senate voted to censure McCarthy for his conduct.

(History.com)

On this day in 1972, Apollo 16 Mission Commander John Young and Charles M. Duke Jr., lunar module pilot, began a three-day stay on the moon. The mission’s primary objectives were to “inspect, survey and sample materials and surface features at a selected landing site in the Descartes region; to emplace and activate surface experiments; and conduct in-flight experiments and photographic tasks from lunar orbit.” The astronauts also performed experiments requiring zero gravity and evaluated of spacecraft and equipment.

(NASA)

In 1895, Cuba attempted to overthrow Spanish colonial rule. The rebels received financial assistance from private US interests and used America as a base of operations. The Spanish military responded and approximately 100,000 Cuban civilians died between 1895 and 1898. President William McKinley originally tried to avoid an armed conflict with Spain, but popular sentiment bolstered by hawkish American media pushed for a war to give Cubans their independence. On Feb. 17, 1898, the battleship USS Maine, moored in Havana’s harbor, sank after two explosions and 252 men on board were killed. Observers immediately blamed Spain and McKinley bowed to calls for war on April 20, 1898. However the cause of the explosion was later revealed to be spontaneous ignition of faulty ammunition on board.

(History.com)

The Bay of Pigs invasion began when a CIA-financed and -trained group of Cuban refugees landed in Cuba attempting to topple the communist government of Fidel Castro. Castro had been a concern to U.S. policymakers since he seized power in January 1959. His attacks on U.S. companies in Cuba, inflammatory anti-American rhetoric and Cuba’s movement toward a closer relationship with the Soviet Union led U.S. officials to consider him a threat to US interests in the Western Hemisphere. President John F. Kennedy inherited the training program from Dwight Eisenhower in 1961. On April 17, 1961, around 1,200 armed exiles waded ashore at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, hoping to be a rallying point for the Cuban citizenry to overthrow Castro’s government. Instead, the landing force met with unexpectedly rapid counterattacks from Castro’s military, and the Cuban leader used the incident to request additional Soviet military aid – including missiles. This sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

(History.com)

In the 1980s, the agro-food and health industries began developing genetically modified organisms in hope of future commercial applications. On April 16, 1987, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences acknowledged that a non-naturally occurring polyploid Pacific coast oyster capable of year-round reproduction was eligible for a patent because it is a product of human ingenuity, not of nature. The first patent for a genetically-modified mammal was given to Harvard University the following year for a lab mouse modified with a gene of human origin.

(Marine Genetic Resources, R&D and the Law 1: Complex Objects of Use)

The Continental Congress ratified preliminary articles of peace ending the Revolutionary War with Great Britain on this day in 1783. The June 1, 1781, entry in the Journals of the Continental Congress notes “that Congress have received undoubted intelligence … that the Courts of Vienna and Petersburg have offered their mediation to the belligerent powers for the re-establishment of peace…” A few days later the Congress instructed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Henry Laurens and Thomas Jefferson to negotiate a treaty, although Jefferson did not ultimately go. France, who had been allied with the U.S. since 1778, along with Spain and the Netherlands also sought to end hostilities with Great Britain and pressured the U.S. to seek peace only in alliance. But the Americans were determined that a separate preliminary treaty with Great Britain was better for their own long-term stability. The treaty’s main terms guaranteed U.S. independence from Britain and acquisition of territory that lay between the thirteen colonies and the Mississippi River, which became known as the Northwest Territory.

(Library of Congress)

John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer originally plotted with six others to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln and take him to Richmond, but the scheme failed and two weeks later Richmond fell to the Union. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy. They instead decided to simultaneously kill Lincoln at the April 14 performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.; Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. Conspirator Lewis Powell managed to wound Seward at his home while George Atzerodt, lost his nerve to kill Johnson and fled. At the theater, Booth entered Lincoln’s private theater box unnoticed, and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. He jumped from the box, breaking his left leg and escaped the city but was apprehended and shot on April 26.

(History.com)

On April 13, 1970, oxygen tank No. 2 blew up onboard NASA’s Apollo 13 spacecraft – the third manned lunar landing mission. Astronauts James Lovell, John Swigert, and Fred Haise had left Earth two days before for the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon but were forced to turn their attention to safely returning home. Mission commander Lovell reported to mission control on Earth: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and it was discovered that the normal supply of oxygen, electricity, light, and water had been disrupted. The landing mission was aborted, and the astronauts and controllers on Earth scrambled to come up with emergency procedures. The crippled spacecraft continued to the moon, circled it, and began a long, cold journey back to Earth. The logistical and navigational maneuvers required were untested and incredibly challenging, but the crew touched down safely in the Pacific Ocean on April 17.

(History.com)

The Patent Act of 1790 was the first patent statute passed by the federal government of the United States. It was enacted on April 10, 1790, about one year after the constitution was ratified and a new government was organized. The law defined the subject matter of a U.S. patent as “any useful art, manufacture, engine, machine, or device, or any improvement there on not before known or used.” It granted the applicant the “sole and exclusive right and liberty of making, constructing, using and vending to others to be used” of his invention. The authority to grant and refuse patents was handled completely by the Patent Board, which was composed of three members: the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Attorney General. The first patent went to Samuel Hopkins on July 31 of that year, for his processes of making pot and pearl ash.

(Wikipedia)

On this day in 1959, NASA announced the first seven astronauts selected to participate in Project Mercury. Dubbed the “Mercury Seven” by the press, those chosen were John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra and Donald “Deke” Slayton. Project Mercury was the U.S.’ first manned space-flight program. Its mission was to put an American in orbit around the Earth. Shepard first went to space aboard Freedom 7 but despite reaching an altitude of 116.5 statute miles and attaining a top speed of 5,134 mph, he did not complete an orbit. That feat was completed by Glenn 11 months later.

(Wired)

When the World Wars ended, a string of labor strikes provoked a change in political climate and a Republican takeover of Congress. Over President Harry S Truman’s veto, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, resetting the limits of labor disputes and redefining the government’s capability to respond. In 1952, the threat of a strike by steelworkers provoked a clash about the limits of executive power. In November 1951, as the Korean War was in gear, steelworkers sought a new contract with the domestic industry. The industry, in turn, sought government approval for steep price increases to pay for new labor costs. When the Office of Price Stabilization pared back its demands as opportunistic, labor talks stalled. On April 8, 1952, hours before a strike was to begin, Truman issued Executive Order 10340, directing Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to seize control of the nation’s steel production, including the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. and other steel mills. The companies sought a restraining order, arguing a government-imposed wage scale would cause irreparable economic harm. The issue went to the Supreme Court which ruled 6-3 against the Truman administration.

(ABA Journal)

Twenty years ago today, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Senior Citizens’ Freedom To Work Act of 2000. It eliminates the Social Security retirement earnings test in and after the month in which a person attains full retirement age of 65. It also states that, in the calendar year the beneficiary attains the full retirement age, the earnings limit for those at the full retirement age through age 69 is permanently applied. It also permits, beginning with the month in which the beneficiary reaches full retirement age and ending with the month prior to attainment of age 70, the retired worker to earn a delayed retirement credit for any month for which the retired worker requests that benefits not be paid even though he/she is already on the benefit rolls. All of this was to help older Americans stay in the work force longer or help those who still needed to work, as economic trends had changes since Social Security’s inception during the Great Depression.

(Social Security Administration)

The United States formally declared war against Germany and entered Wolrd War I in Europe on April 6, 1917, joining the Allied powers of Britain, France, and Russia which had been fighting since the summer of 1914. For three years, President Woodrow Wilson preached American neutrality – a policy which had broad support – but incidents, including the loss of 128 American lives when German submarines sank the Lusitania in 1915, changed public opinion. Under the command of Maj. Gen. John J. Pershing, over 2 million U.S. troops served in France during the war and an estimated 116,516 were killed. On the homefront, to meet increased demands for goods, the federal government expanded dramatically and took an unprecedented role in guiding the economy. Military service and wartime jobs drew thousands of African Americans from the South to the North in the Great Migration.

(Library of Congress)

On this day in 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed the Economic Assistance Act, which authorized the creation of a program that would help the nations of Europe recover and rebuild after the devastation wrought by World War II. The Marshall Plan aimed to stabilize Europe economically and politically to ward off the appeal of communist parties. Secretary of State George C. Marshall called for the plan in 1947, and The Committee of European Economic Cooperation eventually presented a unified plan before Congress, which authorized the Economic Cooperation Act on April 2, 1948. Truman signed it the following day. It gave $13 billion in aid over four years, mostly in direct grants and loans, to the United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Sweden, Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey and West Germany. Participating countries saw their gross national products go up by 15 to 25 percent.

(History.com)

The Coinage Act or the Mint Act, passed by Congress on April 2, 1792, created the U.S. dollar as the country’s standard unit of money, established the U.S. Mint and regulated the coinage of the United States. The law established the silver dollar as the unit of money in the United States, declared it to be lawful tender, and formed a decimal system for U.S. currency. The Mint had five original officers while one person could perform the functions of Chief Coiner and Engraver. The following coins were created as a result: Eagles ($10), Half eagles ($5), quarter eagles ($2.50), dollars or units ($1), half dollars ($0.50), quarter dollars ($0.25), dimes, half dimes, cents and half cents.

(Wikipedia)

The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, signed by President Richard Nixon on April 1, 1970, is designed to limit the practice of smoking. It required a stronger health warning on cigarette packages, saying “Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined that Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.” It also banned cigarette advertisements on American radio and television. The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act was one of the major bills resulting from the 1964 report by the Surgeon General, Luther Terry that  found that lung cancer and chronic bronchitis are causally related to cigarette smoking. One of the major advocates of the cigarette advertising ban was the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC argued that since the topic of smoking is controversial, numerous TV and radio stations continued to break the Fairness Doctrine when airing these commercials because they did not give equal time to the opposing viewpoint that smoking is dangerous.

(Wikipedia)

To combat the staggering unemployment of the Great Depression and preserve the nation’s natural resources, Congress created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) on March 31, 1933. CCC jobs were manual labor and included shelter at camps, food, clothing and $30 per month which mostly had to be sent home to corps members’ families. The CCC built national parks, federal highways, flood control infrastructure and more. Before its demise in 1942, when the U.S.’ involvement in World War II meant the need for soldiers and wartime labor grew, the CCC employed more than 3 million young men on conservation projects in every state. The CCC was one of the most popular programs of the New Deal.

(Wikipedia)

On this day in 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest outside the Washington Hilton hotel in the nation’s capital by John Hinckley Jr., a deranged drifter who had previously been arrested on weapons charges in Tennessee and who was found not guilty by reason of insanity. After Reagan finished addressing a labor meeting at the hotel and was walking with his entourage to his limousine, Hinckley, standing among a group of reporters, fired six shots at the president. He hit  Reagan and three of his attendants: White House Press Secretary James Brady was shot in the head and critically wounded, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy was shot in the side, and D.C. policeman Thomas Delahanty was shot in the neck. Reagan sustained a bullet to the left lung and was taken to surgery for two hours. The next day, he resumed some of his executive duties and signed a piece of legislation from his hospital bed. While McCarthy and Delahanty recovered, Brady suffered permanent brain damage. He later became an advocate of gun control, and in 1993 Congress passed the “Brady Bill,” which established a five-day waiting period and background checks for prospective gun buyers.

(History.com)

When President Andrew Jackson appointed young Sen. John Eaton to be his Secretary of War on March 27, 1829, it ignited a scandal which became known as the Petticoat Affair. Led by Floride Calhoun, wife of Vice President John C. Calhoun, Washington’s society wives refused to socialize with Eaton’s wife Peggy, who was the wife of his late friend John Timberlake. Eaton, himself a widower, and Peggy married only a few months after her first husband’s death at sea in the Mediterranean Squadron. That, plus her experience working in her father’s tavern and boarding house, led to rumors that she and Eaton has been involved prior to John Timberlake’s death and that Peggy was sexually promiscuous. The “Petticoats,” as the disapproving wives were known for their parlor politics, deemed the Eatons’ marriage a moral failure and the fallout was so great that Eaton even considered resigning from Jackson’s administration. But Jackson viewed it more as an attempt by Calhoun supporters, who wanted to deny Jackson a second term, to undermine his presidency.

(Wikipedia)

In honor of “The Mammoth Cheese,” a 1,200-pound cheese wheel sent to President Thomas Jefferson in 1802 by Elder John Leland as a political statement about religious freedom, the U.S. Navy decided to make a sequel gift. They gave the president what they called the “Mammoth Loaf” of bread to be eaten at a party in the Senate on March 26, 1804. Leland’s followers were Baptists in the largely non-Baptist New England, and the cheese was seen as a symbol of religious freedom and diversity – it was made from the milk of 900 Republican cows, no Federalist ones. The cheese was engraved with the motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” The Federalist newspapers weren’t amused by the stunt, and they called it “mammoth” as an insult because Jefferson’s supporters had started using the word to describe various things related to him. By the time the loaf arrived to Capitol Hill, the cheese was too old to eat but the bread was placed in a Senate committee room, along with roast beef, cider, and whiskey.

(National Constitution Center)

Written by Allen Ginsberg between 1954 and 1955, “Howl”, also known as “Howl for Carl Solomon”, is a poem considered to be one of the great works of American literature and is one of the most famous writings by the Beat Generation of artists. But in 1957, the poem’s references of illicit drug use and homosexuality led to its publishers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao of City Lights Books in San Francisco, to be charged with disseminating obscene literature, and both were arrested. On March 25 of that year, U.S. customs officials seized 520 copies of the poem being imported from England. At the obscenity trial, nine literary experts testified on the poem’s behalf. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Ferlinghetti won the case when California State Superior Court Judge Clayton Horn decided that the poem was of “redeeming social importance.”

(Wikipedia)

On March 24, 1958, Elvis Presley was drafted into the Army as a private at Fort Chaffee, near Fort Smith, Arkansas. Hundreds of people descended on Presley as he stepped from the bus; upon entering the fort Presley announced that he was looking forward to his service and that he did not want to be treated any differently from the rest of his unit. He began basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, after which he joined the 3rd Armored Division in Friedberg, Germany, on Oct. 1. While on maneuvers, Presley was introduced to amphetamines by a sergeant, as well as to karate.

(Wikipedia)

During World Wars I and II the U.S. Army used the Signal Pigeon Corps to send homing pigeons for communication and reconnaissance purposes. The Army Pigeon Service, as it was also called, included 3,150 soldiers and 54,000 pigeons, which had a message reception rate of about 90%. The birds were trained at the US Army Pigeon Breeding and Training Center was based at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and at Camp Crowder. Fifteen “hero pigeons” were donated to zoos, among the most famous being G.I. Joe, President Wilson and Cher Ami, the last of which was awarded the French Croix de Guerre. President Wilson also managed to deliver a message across enemy lines despite his leg and breast being shot. About a thousand pigeons were sold to the public, the last one being sold March 23, 1957.

(Wikipedia)

On March 7, 1965, a day which became known as Bloody Sunday, 600 demonstrators marched on Alabama’s capital city of Montgomery to protest voting disenfranchisement of blacks and the earlier killing of a black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by a state trooper. The brutal attacks on marchers by state and local police were televised nationwide, and a second march was organized two days later but turned around by Martin Luther King Jr., who was head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. An Alabama federal judge ruled on March 18 that a third march from Selma to Montgomery could go ahead, so President Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers worked to ensure the safety of demonstrators. After Alabama Gov. George Wallace refused to use National Guard troops to protect the marchers, on March 20, Johnson informed him he would use federal authority to summon the troops. Several days later, 50,000 marchers followed King some 54 miles, under the watchful eyes of state and federal troops.

(History.com)

On this day in 2003, the U.S., along with coalition forces primarily from the United Kingdom, initiated war on Iraq. Just after explosions began in the capital of Baghdad, U.S. President George W. Bush announced in a televised address, “At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Bush and his advisers built much of their case for war on the idea that Iraq, under dictator Saddam Hussein, possessed or was in the process of building weapons of mass destruction – a claim which turned out to be false and based on faulty intelligence. In response to the attacks, Republic of Iraq radio in Baghdad announced, “the evil ones, the enemies of God, the homeland and humanity, have committed the stupidity of aggression against our homeland and people.” Coalition forces toppled Hussein’s regime and captured Iraq’s major cities in just three weeks, leading Bush to declare the end of major combat operations on May 1 that year. But an insurgency has continued an intense guerrilla war in Iraq and the U.S. did not declare an end to the war in Iraq until Dec. 15, 2011.

(History.com)

Before statehood became effective on Aug. 21, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Admission Act to formally make Hawaii part of the Union on March 18 of that year, thereby dissolving the Territory of Hawaii. In 1946 the United Nations had listed Hawaii as a non-self-governing territory of the U.S. Hawaii was first settled by humans from 124-1120 AD and was not inhabited by Europeans until the late 1700s. From then it was settled by waves of arrivals, a unified kingdom was established, and disease and plantations changed the landscape as well as the population. The campaign for annexation effectively began with the overthrow of Hawaii’s last monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, in 1893. The Admission Act passed with about 93% support from registered voters, which, with a turnout of nearly 140,000 of the state’s 155,000 registered voters was the highest Hawaii had ever seen. Opposition to statehood came notably from Native Hawaiians and Southern U.S. lawmakers, especially for racial reasons considering Hawaii had a large percentage of Asian Americans.

(Wikipedia)

Pittsburgh banker and later Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon began gathering a private collection of old master paintings and sculptures during World War I, eventually focusing his efforts on establishing a new national gallery for the United States. In 1930-1931, the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust made its first major acquisition from the Soviet sale of paintings from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. When the Smithsonian Institution’s National Gallery director retired, Mellon asked the Smithsonian secretary not to appoint a successor and instead endow a new building with funds for expansion of the collections. Mellon’s trial for tax evasion led him to modify his plans and in 1937, he formally offered to create the new Gallery. On his birthday, 24 March 1937, an Act of Congress accepted the collection and building funds – provided through the Trust – and approved the construction of a museum on the National Mall. The new gallery was to be effectively self-governing, not controlled by the Smithsonian, but took the old name “National Gallery of Art” while the Smithsonian’s gallery would be renamed the “National Collection of Fine Arts” – now the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The new structure was completed and accepted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of the American people on March 17, 1941. Neither Mellon nor Pope lived to see the museum completed.

(Wikipedia)

The United States Military Academy – the first military school in the country – was founded by Congress on this day in 1802. Located at West Point, New York, and simply known as West Point, the institution is located on the site of a Revolutionary-era fort built to protect the Hudson River Valley from British attack. Ten years after the establishment of the U.S. Military Academy in 1802, the growing threat of another war with Great Britain resulted in congressional action to expand the academy’s facilities and increase the West Point corps. Beginning in 1817, the U.S. Military Academy was reorganized by superintendent Sylvanus Thayer, later known as the “father of West Point,” and the school became one of the nation’s finest sources of civil engineers. In 1870, the first African-American cadet was admitted into the U.S. Military Academy, and in 1976, the first female cadets were admitted. The academy is now under the general direction and supervision of the department of the Army and has an enrollment of more than 4,000 students.

(History.com)

On March 13, 1942, the Quartermaster Corps of the US Army began training dogs for the newly established War Dog Program, or “K-9 Corps.” Well over 1 million dogs served on both sides during World War I, carrying messages along the trenches and providing some comfort to the soldiers. The most famous of which was Rin Tin Tin, who was later taken to the United States and appeared in silent films. In the U.S., training dogs for military purposes was largely abandoned after WWI but in December 1941, the American Kennel Association and a group called Dogs for Defense began a movement to mobilize dog owners to donate healthy and capable animals to the QMC. Training began in March 1942, and that fall the QMC was given the task of training dogs for the U.S. Navy, Marines and Coast Guard as well.

(History.com)

Janet Reno became the first female U.S. attorney general on this day in 1993, being sworn in one day after  being unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Raised in Miami, she was a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Law School, and worked at private law firms before joining government as a staff member of the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives. She later worked for the Dade County State Attorney’s Office, and was the first woman to serve as a state attorney in Florida, a position she was re-elected to four times. She established the first drug court and prosecuted a large number of child abusers. Her tenure as attorney general included the Branch Dividian Compound siege in Waco, Texas; an antitrust suit brought against Microsoft for its operating system; the capture and convictions of the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bomber; the Elián González custody battle; and the Fiske investigation of the Whitewater controversy.

(Wikipedia)

On March 11, 1779, Congress established the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help plan, design and prepare environmental and structural facilities for the Army. Made up of civilian workers, members of the Continental Army and French officers, the USACE played an essential role in the critical Revolutionary War battles at Bunker Hill, Saratoga and Yorktown. In 1794, Congress created a Corps of Artillerists and Engineers to serve the same purpose under the new federal government. Upon its re-establishment, the Corps began its chief task of creating and maintaining military fortifications. These responsibilities increased in urgency as the new United States prepared for a second war with Britain in the years before 1812. The Corps’ fortifications of New York Harbor not only deterred British naval commanders but later served as the foundations for the Statue of Liberty. Since then USACE evolved from providing services for the military to helping map out the uncharted territories that would become the western United States including navigation and flood control of the nation’s river systems. Today, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers is made up of more than 35,000 civilian and enlisted men and women.

(History.com)

On this day in 1864, President Abraham Lincoln officially promoted then-Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to the rank of lieutenant general of the U.S. Army, tasking the future president with the job of leading all Union troops against the Confederate Army. Use of the rank had been suspended in 1799 but in 1862, Lincoln asked Congress to revive it in order to distinguish between the general in charge of all Union forces and other generals of equal rank who served under him in the field. Congress also wanted to reinstate the rank of lieutenant general, but only if Lincoln gave the rank to Grant. The president preferred to promote then-Commanding Gen. Henry Halleck to lead the Union Army, which had been plagued by a string of ineffective leaders and terrible losses in battle. At the time there were rumors that many northern senators were considering nominating Grant instead of Lincoln at the 1864 Republican National Convention. After Grant publicly dismissed the idea of running for the presidency, Lincoln submitted to Congress’ choice and agreed to give Grant the revived rank. As lieutenant general of the U.S. Army, Grant was answerable only to Lincoln.

(History.com)

On March 9, 1862, one of the most famous naval battles in American history occurs as two ironclads, the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, fought to a draw off Hampton Roads, Virginia. The ships pounded each other all morning but their armor plates easily deflected the cannon shots, signaling a new era of steam-powered iron ships. The CSS Virginia was originally the USS Merrimack, a 40-gun frigate launched in 1855. The Confederates captured it and covered it in heavy armor plating above the waterline. The battle between the Virginia and the Monitor began on the morning of March 9, and continued for four hours. The ships circled one another, jockeying for position as they fired their guns. The cannon balls simply deflected off the iron ships. In the early afternoon, the Virginia pulled back to Norfolk. Neither ship was seriously damaged, but the Monitor effectively ended the short reign of terror that the Confederate ironclad had brought to the Union navy.

(History.com)

On March 6, 1820, President James Monroe signed the Missouri Compromise, also known as the Compromise Bill of 1820, into law. The bill attempted to equalize the number of slave-holding states and free states in the country, allowing Missouri into the Union as a slave state while Maine joined as a free state. Additionally, portions of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of the 36-degrees-30-minutes latitude line were prohibited from engaging in slavery by the bill. Monroe realized that slavery conflicted with the values written into the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence but, like his fellow Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, feared abolition would split apart the nation they had fought so hard to establish. He predicted this course would lead to a peaceful system, but in the end, the Missouri Compromise failed to permanently ease underlying tensions which erupted 40 years later during the Civil War.

(History.com)

On the night of March 5, 1770, a mob of American colonists gathered at the Customs House in Boston and began taunting the British soldiers guarding the building. The troops had been sent to Boston in 1768 to enforce unpopular taxation measures passed by Parliament, which lacked American representation. Private Hugh Montgomery was hit, leading him to discharge his rifle at the crowd, followed by the other soldiers a moment later, and when the smoke cleared, five colonists were dead or dying: Crispus Attucks, Patrick Carr, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick and James Caldwell, while three more were injured. Although it is unclear whether Attucks, an African American, was the first to fall as is commonly believed, the deaths of the five men are regarded by some historians as the first fatalities in the American Revolutionary War. Future president John Adams and Josiah Quincy agreed to defend the soldiers at their trial as a show of support of the colonial justice system. Two of them were found guilty of manslaughter and had their thumbs branded with an “M” for murder as punishment. The event became a rallying cry for Patriots — thanks in part to a widely circulated engraving of the massacre by Paul Revere — and a month later the war’s first battle took place at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts.

(History.com)

On March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson upheld an inaugural tradition begun by Thomas Jefferson for an open house at the White House. After his swearing-in ceremony and address to Congress, Jackson returned to the White House to meet and greet a flock of politicians, celebrities and citizens. Very shortly, the crowd swelled to more than 20,000 and the place erupted in chaos. Some guests stood on furniture in muddy shoes while others rummaged through rooms looking for the president, breaking dishes, crystal and grinding food into the carpet along the way. White House staff reported the carpets smelled of cheese for months afterward. Partygoers were lured out of the building washtubs full of juice and whiskey on the lawn. Surprisingly, this was not the last open house — the tradition stopped in 1885, after multiple assassination attempts increased security fears.

(History.com)

During the Civil War, Congress passed a conscription act that produced the first wartime draft of U.S. citizens in American history. The act called for registration of all males between the ages of 20 and 45, including aliens with the intention of becoming citizens, by April 1. Exemptions from the draft could be bought for $300 or by finding a substitute draftee. This clause led to bloody draft riots in New York City, where protesters were outraged that exemptions were effectively granted only to the wealthiest citizens. Although the Civil War saw the first compulsory conscription of citizens for wartime service, a 1792 act by Congress required that all able-bodied male citizens purchase a gun and join their local state militia. There was no penalty for noncompliance with this act. During the Civil War, the government of the Confederate States of America also enacted a compulsory military draft. The U.S. enacted a military drafts again during World Wars I and II, during the Korean War and finally, during the Vietnam War.

(History.com)

Pioneer 10, the world’s first outer-planetary probe, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on this day in 1972. The spacecraft was on a mission to Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet. In December 1973, after successfully negotiating the asteroid belt and a distance of 620 million miles, Pioneer 10 reached Jupiter and sent back to Earth the first close-up images of the spectacular gas giant. In June 1983, the NASA spacecraft left the solar system and the next day radioed back the first scientific data on interstellar space. NASA officially ended the Pioneer 10 project on March 31, 1997, with the spacecraft having traveled a distance of some 6 billion miles. Headed in the direction of the Taurus constellation, Pioneer 10 will pass within three light years of another star–Ross 246–in the year 34,600 A.D.

(History.com)

On this date in 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms launched the first of two raids against the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, as part of an investigation into illegal possession of firearms and explosives by the Christian cult. As the agents attempted to penetrate the complex, gunfire erupted that killed four ATF agents and wounded 15 — the highest of any ATF operation — as well as killing six Branch Davidians. After 45 minutes of shooting, the ATF agents withdrew, and a cease-fire was negotiated over the telephone. The cult’s leader David Koresh had previously been tried for attempted murder of former Davidian leader George Roden. He had also taken multiple wives and fathered multiple children with them, including some who were are young as 12 when they became pregnant — allegations of abuse of the children also surfaced. His survivalist interpretation of the Bible espoused stockpiling weapons and explosives in preparation for the apocalypse. The raid ended on April 18, after the FBI fired tear gas cannisters into the building — a decision the bureau apologized for in 1999 — and a fire ignited, killing Koresh and at least 80 of his followers.

(History.com)

The 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified when Minnesota became the 36th state to ratify it on Feb. 27, 1951. It limits the number of times an individual is eligible for election to the presidency and also states that an individual who fills an unexpired presidential term lasting greater than two years is prohibited from winning election as president more than once. Prior to its ratification, presidential term limits had been repeatedly debated but never solidified, although George Washington had effectively established a two-term precedent which all other presidents followed. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the only president to win a third term — and then a fourth, during which he died in office 82 days after inauguration — giving rise to concerns about presidents serving an unlimited number of terms. When Republicans gained control of Congress two years later, as many had campaigned in favor of term limits, the issue was made a top priority and passed shortly thereafter.  The last states to ratify the amendment were North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Florida, and Alabama. Oklahoma and Massachusetts rejected the amendment, while Arizona, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Washington, and West Virginia took no action.

(Wikipedia)

The last Marines sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force in 1982 left Beirut on this day in 1984. Of the 800 sent, about 250 Marines lost their lives in the conflict. Civil war erupted in Lebanon in 1975, with Palestinian and leftist Muslim guerrillas battling militias of the Christian Phalange Party, the Maronite Christian community and other groups. For years, Syrian, Israeli, and United Nations interventions failed to resolve the fighting and a multinational force was ordered to Beirut to help coordinate the Palestinian withdrawal. The first Marine to die in the mission was killed while defusing a bomb, while others were killed by snipers, a 1983 a suicide bomb at the U.S. embassy in Beirut, as well as from an explosives-packed truck which a terrorist drove into the Marine barracks — which alone killed 241 U.S. military personnel. That same morning, 58 French soldiers were killed in their barracks two miles away in a separate suicide terrorist attack. The identities of the embassy and barracks bombers were not determined, but they were suspected to be Shiite terrorists associated with Iran. After the barracks bombing, many questioned President Ronald Reagan’s strategy in Lebanon. On Oct. 23, 1983, Reagan vowed to keep the Marines in Lebanon but four more months later announced their withdrawal, leaving a small contingent to guard the US embassy in Beirut.

(History.com)

On Feb. 25, 1862, Congress passed the Legal Tender Act, authorizing the use of paper notes to pay the government’s bills. This ended the long-standing policy of using only gold or silver in transactions, and it allowed the government to finance the enormously costly Civil War long after its gold and silver reserves were depleted. Soon after the war began, several proposals involving the use of bonds were suggested. Finally, Congress began printing money, which the Confederacy had been doing since the beginning of the war. The Legal Tender Act allowed the government to print $150 million in paper money, called “greenbacks,” which were not backed by a similar amount of gold and silver. Many bankers, financial experts and legislators worried about the nation’s financial infrastructure, but the scheme worked better than expected — allowing the government to pay its bills and boost the Northern economy. In 1862, Congress also passed an income tax and steep excise taxes, both of which cooled the inflationary pressures created by the greenbacks.

(History.com)

Voice of America, the radio broadcasting network of the federal government and an organization of the U.S. Information Agency first broadcast on this date in 1942. The transmission was in German and was intended to counter Nazi propaganda among the German people. By the time World War II ended, the VOA was broadcasting 3,200 programs in 40 languages every week. It became part of the USIA when that agency was established in 1953. The VOA’s function is to promote understanding of the U.S. and to spread American values. During the Cold War its programs focused on the communist countries of eastern and central Europe. Daily broadcasts include news reports, stories and discussions on American political and cultural events, and editorials setting forth US government policy. VOA produces and broadcasts radio programs in English and foreign languages, and operates broadcasting and relay stations.

(Encyclopedia Britannica)

On this day in 1975, three of the most powerful men in the nation during the Nixon Administration were sentenced to prison for their roles in the Watergate Scandal cover-up. Former Attorney General John Mitchell; H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff; and John D. Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief domestic affairs adviser, were each sentenced to serve two-and-a-half to eight years in prison, by Judge John J. Sirica of Federal District Court. Robert Mardian, a former assistant attorney general, was also sentenced to 10 months to three years. The four men were convicted of conspiring to obstruct justice in the original Watergate investigation through such means as paying “hush money” to the Watergate burglars in return for their silence about the break‐in of the Democratic National, Committee, headquarters at the Watergate office and apartment complex on June 17, 1972. All but Mardian were also convicted of obstruction of justice, and in addition, of various counts of lying under oath. One defendant in the case was acquitted: Kenneth W. Parkinson, a former attorney for the Committee for the Re‐election of the President. Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mardian were the highest former officials to be convicted in the scandal. Mitchell only served 19 months, while Haldeman and Ehrlichman each served only 18 months before all three were released on parole. According to The New York Times, Mitchell was the only one of the four to comment on the sentencing, telling reporters, “It could have been a hell of a lot worse. They could have sentenced me to spend the rest of my life with Martha,” his estranged wife.

(The New York Times/Wikipedia)

On Feb. 20, 1792, President George Washington signed legislation renewing the United States Post Office as a cabinet department led by the postmaster general, guaranteeing inexpensive delivery of all newspapers, stipulating the right to privacy and granting Congress the ability to expand postal service to new areas of the nation. The Postal Service Act gave the postmaster general greater legislative legitimacy and more effective organization. It was considered a plum patronage post for political allies of the president until the Postal Service was transformed into a corporation run by a board of governors in 1971. The plan for a Constitutional Post began with William Goddard, a Patriot printer, in 1774. Benjamin Franklin promoted Goddard’s plan and served as the first postmaster general under the Continental Congress beginning in 1775. Franklin had already served as the postmaster of Philadelphia from 1737 and as joint postmaster general of the colonies from 1753 to 1774. He streamlined postal delivery with properly surveyed and marked routes from Maine to Florida (the origins of Route 1), instituted overnight postal travel between the critical cities of New York and Philadelphia and created a standardized rate chart based upon weight and distance.

(History.com)

On Feb.19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering the removal of resident enemy aliens from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941, Roosevelt came under increasing pressure by military and political advisers to address the nation’s fears of further Japanese attack or sabotage, particularly on the West Coast. The region was also home to long-standing racism against Japanese Americans, motivated in part by jealousy over their commercial success and which erupted after the attack. While 9066 also affected Italian and German Americans, the largest numbers of detainees were by far Japanese. Japanese immigrants and their descendants, regardless of American citizenship status or length of residence, were systematically rounded up and placed in detention centers. Thousands of families’ lives were interrupted and in some cases destroyed. Roosevelt delegated enforcement of 9066 to the War Department. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt tried to change her husband’s mind but he rebuked her on the subject, and the Supreme Court twice upheld the order during World War II. Decades later, on Feb. 19, 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an order prohibiting the executive branch from re-instituting 9066. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued a public apology on behalf of the government and authorized reparations for former Japanese internees or their descendants.

(History.com)

Beginning Feb. 18, 1841, and lasting until March 11 that year, the first continuous Senate filibuster began over the issue of dismissal of the printers of the Senate. In 1789, the first Senate adopted rules allowing senators to move the previous question (by simple majority vote), which meant ending debate and proceeding to a vote. But in 1806, the Senate’s presiding officer, Vice President Aaron Burr argued that the previous-question motion was redundant, had only been exercised once in the preceding four years, and should be eliminated. The Senate agreed and modified its rules. This left no alternative mechanism for terminating debate, thereby making filibusters theoretically possible. Until the late 1830s, however, the filibuster remained a solely theoretical option. The first Senate filibuster occurred in 1837. In 1841, a defining moment came during debate on a bill to charter the Second Bank of the United States. Sen. Henry Clay tried to end the debate via majority vote, and Sen. William R. King threatened a filibuster, saying that Clay “may make his arrangements at his boarding house for the winter.” Other senators sided with King, and Clay backed down.

(Kessler, Alexander; Wikipedia)

On Feb.17, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was elected the third president of the United States, marking the first peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another in the United States. By 1800, Jefferson had drafted the Declaration of Independence, served in two Continental Congresses, served as minister to France and secretary of state under George Washington and had been John Adams’ vice president. Vicious partisan warfare characterized the campaign of 1800 between Democratic-Republicans Jefferson and Aaron Burr and Federalists John Adams, Charles C. Pinckney and John Jay. Candidates and influential supporters on both sides used the press, often anonymously, to make slanderous claims against each other, and the confusing voting process, which began in April 1800, ended in a tie between Jefferson and Burr by the end of January 1801 — even though they were on the same ticket as president and vice president, respectively. The final vote was decided by the House of Representatives, where Federalists ruled though were persuaded to elect Jefferson —a staunch anti-Federalist — president over Burr by Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton’s put downs of Burr led to the famous duel between them which cost Hamilton his life. Two weeks before the scheduled inauguration, Jefferson won the election and in his inaugural address, and the flawed voting system was later improved by the 12th Amendment, which was ratified in 1804.

(History.com)

The Commerce Department, established to promote national economic growth, was originally created as the Department of Commerce and Labor on Feb. 14, 1903. It was subsequently renamed the Department of Commerce on March 4, 1913, as the bureaus and agencies specializing in labor were transferred to the new Labor Department. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was transferred from the Interior Department into Commerce, and the Federal Employment Stabilization Office existed within the department from 1931 to 1939. In 1940, the Weather Bureau — now the National Weather Service — was transferred from the Agriculture Department, and the Civil Aeronautics Authority was merged into the department. In 1949, the Public Roads Administration was added to the department due to the dissolution of the Federal Works Agency. In 1958, the independent Federal Aviation Agency was created and the Civil Aeronautics Authority was abolished. Past Commerce secretaries include Herbert Hoover, for whom the Washington, D.C., headquarters building is named and who served in the role for the Harding administration from 1921 to 1928, when he was elected president.

(Wikipedia)

The earliest military action to be noted with a Medal of Honor award was performed by Col. Bernard J.D. Irwin, an assistant army surgeon serving in the first major U.S.-Apache conflict. Near Apache Pass, in southeastern Arizona, Irwin, an Irish-born doctor, volunteered to go to the rescue of 2nd Lt. George N. Bascom, who was trapped with 60 men of the U.S. Seventh Infantry by the Chiricahua Apaches. The first U.S.-Apache conflict had begun several days before, when Cochise, the Chiricahua Apache chief, kidnapped three white men to exchange for his brother and two nephews held by the U.S. Army on false charges of stealing cattle and kidnapping a child. When the exchange was refused, Cochise killed the white men, and the army responded by killing his relatives, setting off the first of the Apache wars. Irwin and 14 men began the 100-mile trek to Bascom’s forces on Feb. 13, 1861, riding on mules. After fighting and capturing Apaches along the way and recovering stolen horses and cattle, they reached Bascom’s forces on Feb. 14 and proved instrumental in breaking the siege. The Medal of Honor award itself was not created until 1862, and it was not until Jan. 21, 1894, that Irwin received the nation’s highest military honor.

(History.com)

As part of the Paris peace settlement of the Vietnam War, North Vietnam began releasing US prisoners of war in Hanoi on Feb. 12, 1973. North Vietnam released 142 of 591 US prisoners at Gia Lam Airport, as part of what was called Operation Homecoming. The first 20 POWs arrived to a hero’s welcome at Travis Air Force Base in California on Valentine’s Day, and the operation completed on March 29, 1973.

(History.com)

On this day in 1903, Congress adopted the Expedition Act, which made anti-trust lawsuits a higher priority for the Justice Department. President Theodore Roosevelt was a strong opponent of companies such as J.P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel Corporation, railroad and meat-packing trusts. These companies created monopolies that hindered competition and greatly affected prices. The Expedition Act “expedited” antitrust suits and added staff to DOJ’s antitrust division.

(Library of Congress)

On Feb. 10, 1962, American spy pilot Francis Gary Powers was released by the Soviets in exchange for Col. Rudolf Abel, a senior KGB spy who was caught in the U.S. five years earlier. The two men were brought to separate sides of the Glienicker Bridge, which connects East and West Berlin, as negotiators talked in the center of the bridge where a white line divided East from West. Finally, Powers and Abel were waved forward and crossed the border into freedom at the same moment — 8:52 a.m. Berlin time. Just before their transfer, Frederic Pryor, an American student held by East German authorities since August 1961, was released to American authorities at another border checkpoint.Abel had been apprehended in New York in 1957, while Powers was arrested by Soviets when his plane from Pakistan to Norway, flying over Soviet territory, was shot down over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains.

(History.com)

While in orbit 170 miles above Earth, Navy Cap. Bruce McCandless II became the first human to perform an untethered space walk on this date in 1984. McCandless exited the U.S. space shuttle Challenger and maneuvered freely, using a bulky white rocket pack of his own design. He orbited Earth in tangent with the shuttle at speeds greater than 17,500 mph — the speed at which satellites normally orbit Earth — and flew up to 320 feet away from the Challenger. After an hour and a half testing and flying the jet-powered backpack and admiring Earth, McCandless safely re-entered the shuttle. Later that day, Army Lt. Col. Robert Stewart tried out the rocket pack, a device considered important for future operations to repair and service orbiting satellites and to assemble and maintain large space stations.

(History)

In his 1985 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan defined some of the key concepts of his foreign policy, establishing what would be known as the “Reagan Doctrine.” The doctrine served as the foundation for the Reagan administration’s support of “freedom fighters” around the globe. More specifically, Reagan declared that, “We must stand by our democratic allies. And we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” In action, this policy translated into covertly supporting the Contras in their attacks on the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua; the Afghan rebels in their fight against the Soviet occupiers; and anticommunist Angolan forces embroiled in that nation’s civil war. In his farewell address in 1989, he claimed success in weakening the Sandinista government, forcing the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan, and bringing an end to the conflict in Angola. Domestic critics, however, decried his actions, claiming that the support of so-called “freedom fighters” resulted only in prolonging and escalating bloody conflicts and in U.S. support of repressive and undemocratic elements in each of the respective nations.

(History.com)

On Feb. 5, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt announced a controversial plan to expand the U.S. Supreme Court to as many as 15 judges, allegedly to make it more efficient. Critics accused him of trying to “pack” the court and thus neutralize Supreme Court justices hostile to his New Deal program. Before then, the court had struck down several key pieces of New Deal legislation as delegating an unconstitutional amount of authority to the executive branch and the federal government. But after a landslide re-election in 1936, Roosevelt issued a proposal to provide retirement at full pay for all members of the court over 70 years old. If a justice refused to retire, an “assistant” with full voting rights was to be appointed, thus ensuring Roosevelt a liberal majority. Most Republicans and many Democrats in Congress opposed the so-called “court-packing” plan. Before the bill came to a vote in Congress, two justices helped a majority of the court to uphold the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act, saying the national economy had grown to such a degree that federal regulation and control was warranted. The “court-packing” plan was considered unnecessary, and in July the Senate struck it down by a vote of 70 to 22.

(History.com)

On this day in 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, delegates from that state as well as from South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana convened to establish the Confederate States of America. The discussion to secede from the Union began in 1858 from the ongoing conflict between the North and the South over the issue of slavery. By 1860, the majority of the slave states were publicly threatening secession if the Republicans, the anti-slavery party, won the presidency. Following Republican Abraham Lincoln’s victory over the divided Democratic Party in November 1860, South Carolina initiated secession proceedings and on Dec. 20 the state’s legislature passed the “Ordinance of Secession.” After the declaration, South Carolina set about seizing forts, arsenals, and other strategic locations within the state. Within six weeks, five more Southern states had followed South Carolina’s lead. On Feb. 9, 1861, the newly christened Confederate States of America elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi their first president.

(History.com)

On this day in 1913 the states ratified the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which says, “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” Article I, Section 2 and Section of the Constitution had created the “rule of apportionment,” which required Congress to tax each state based on the state’s population rather than taxing individuals based on personal wealth or property. And in 1895 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan & Trust Co. that a federal income tax law was unconstitutional because it would violate the rule of apportionment. Although a direct income tax had previously been imposed during the Civil War — when a precursor to the IRS was established — the Court’s ruling spurred Congress to pass the 16th Amendment. The provision gives Congress the power to impose a uniform, direct income tax without being subject to the apportionment rule.

(National Constitution Center)

 

On this day in 1968, as part of the Tet Offensive, a squad of Viet Cong guerillas attacked the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The soldiers seized the embassy and held it for six hours until an assault force of U.S. paratroopers routed the Viet Cong. The effort was planned as a massive, simultaneous attack on the major cities and provincial capitals of South Vietnam, to take place during Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year celebration, which was traditionally a time of decreased fighting. In December 1967, following an attack on the U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh, 50,000 American troops were sent in to defend the area, thereby weakening U.S. positions elsewhere. While the offensive was a crushing military defeat for the Communists, they won a psychological victory that would ultimately help them win the war. The graphic images of U.S. casualties suffered during the offensive helped stoke anti-war sentiment among the American people, who had grown tired of the long conflict. The public was disillusioned by earlier overly optimistic reports of progress in the war and disenchanted with President Lyndon Johnson’s handling of it.

(History.com)

On Jan. 30, 1975, the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary was established at the wreckage site of the USS Monitor — the country’s first ironclad warship which had launched exactly 113 years earlier to the day. The Monitor was commissioned for the Union during the Civil War and revolutionized naval warfare, but its heavy design was ill-equipped for rough waters and was lost in the Atlantic Ocean within a year, along with 16 of the 62 crew aboard. In 1973, scientists from Duke University located the wreckage and in 1974, the U.S. Navy and the National Geographic Society launched a second expedition that produced detailed photographic documentation of the wreck site. One year later, in 1975, the site was designated as the nation’s first marine sanctuary. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986 and in 1998, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration developed a plan to recover significant “iconic” sections of the wreck for conservation and public display. Since then several artifacts, ship components and crew remains have been recovered.

(Wikipedia)

On this day in 2002, in his first State of the Union address since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush described Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” After 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration waited less than a month before invading Afghanistan and deposing the Taliban regime there. Soon after, Bush turned his attention to “regime change” in Iraq. Although there were no direct links between Iraq, Iran and North Korea — Iraq and Iran were geopolitical enemies — the concept of an “axis of evil” united in its desire to harm Americans proved useful to those making the case for a second invasion of Iraq. Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, had invaded Iraq in 1990 after repelling the Iraqi invasion of neighboring Kuwait, but left Saddam Hussein in power. The State of the Union speech outlined the second Bush administration’s logic to the War on Terror, and its foreign policy. Bush speechwriter David Frum is credited with coining the term “axis of evil. The president argued that each axis nation was in the process of building weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.

(History.com)

 

At 11:38 a.m. EST, on Jan. 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with seven crew aboard. The launch was delayed six days because of weather and technical problems. Seventy-three seconds after lift off, with hundreds watching from on the ground and millions more on television, the shuttle broke up in a forking plume of smoke and fire. There were no survivors. In the aftermath of the disaster, President Ronald Reagan appointed a special commission to determine what went wrong and to develop future corrective measures. The investigation determined that the disaster was caused by the failure of an “O-ring” seal in one of the two solid-fuel rockets. The elastic O-ring did not respond as expected because of the cold temperature at launch time. The Commission also found problems with NASA’s organizational culture and decision-making processes, saying the agency violated its own safety rules. NASA managers had known since 1977 that contractor Morton-Thiokol’s design contained a potentially catastrophic flaw in the O-rings, but they had failed to address this problem properly. NASA managers also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching at low temperatures that morning. As a result, NASA did not send astronauts into space for more than two years as it redesigned a number of features of the space shuttle.

(Wikipedia)

The government detonated the first of a series of nuclear bombs at its new Nevada Proving Ground, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, on this date in 1951. The effect was a tremendous explosion, the flash from which was seen as far away as San Francisco. In the post-World War II/Cold War-era the West, with its large swaths of unimpeded, unpopulated federally-owned land, was an ideal region for military testing. The federal government continued to conduct atmospheric tests for six more years at the Nevada site, studying the effects on humans by stationing ground troops as close as 2,500 yards from ground zero and moving them even closer shortly after the detonation. By 1957, though, the effects of radioactivity on the soldiers and the surrounding population led the government to begin testing bombs underground, and by 1962, all atmospheric testing had ceased.

(History.com)

On this day in 2003, the Department of Homeland Security was effectively created as the 15th Cabinet agency and Thomas Ridge was sworn in as its secretary. The George W. Bush administration established the White House Office of Homeland Security in October 2001, following the attacks of Sept. 11, and Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, was chosen to lead it. During his tenure at DHS until Feb. 1, 2005, he oversaw the reorganization of more than 180,000 employees from a combined 22 components to one agency dedicated to safeguarding national security.

(DHS)

The 24th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on Aug. 27, 1962, and was ratified by the states on Jan. 23, 1964. Former Confederate states adopted poll taxes in the late 19th century in the decades after the end of Reconstruction as a measure to prevent African Americans and often poor whites from voting. The practice was also upheld by Supreme Court of the United States in the 1937 decision Breedlove v. Suttles. Five states still retained poll taxes at the time of the 24th Amendment’s ratification: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia. Not until 1966 when the Supreme Court ruled in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes for any level of elections were unconstitutional because they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Subsequent litigation related to potential discriminatory effects of voter registration requirements has generally been based on application of this clause.

(Wikipedia)

On Jan. 22, 1997, the Senate voted unanimously to confirm Madeleine Albright as secretary of State. She was sworn in the following day and became the highest-ranking woman to serve in any federal government post to that point. She was born in Prague to Jewish parents while her father was a Czech diplomat. Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and later Communist rule there motivated her parents to move the family to several countries before arriving in the U.S. in 1948, when Albright was 11 years old. Her interest in international affairs was evident as early as high school, and she studied politics and international relations at Wellesley College, Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. She worked in newspapers before joining the Carter administration in the West Wing in as the National Security Council’s congressional liaison. She was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for the Clinton administration, and was a proponent of US support for the financially-beleaguered organization — although highly critical of Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali — which put her at odds with several members of Congress. She also favored expanding NATO and the use of U.S. military force in Iraq in 1998.

(Time/Wikipedia)

In the conclusion to one of the most spectacular trials in US history, after two years of deliberations, former State Department official Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury on Jan. 21, 1950. His conviction was in regards to testimony about his alleged involvement in a Soviet spy ring before and during World War II. Hiss served nearly four years in jail, but always denied the charges. The case began when Whittaker Chambers, an admitted ex-communist and an editor with Time magazine, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and charged that Hiss was a communist in the 1930s and 1940s. Chambers also declared that Hiss, during his work in the State Department in the 1930s, had passed him top secret reports. Hiss appeared before the committee and denied knowing Chambers, but upon confronting him later Hiss admitted that he know the former editor — Chambers had been using another name at the time. In short order, Chambers produced the “Pumpkin Papers”— copies of the documents he said Hiss passed him during the 1930s. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and President Harry S. Truman said the committee was using “red herrings” to defame Hiss, while opponents said officials were “coddling” communists. Because the statute of limitations had run out, he was not tried for treason. The first trial for perjury ended in a deadlocked jury while the second trial ended with a guilty verdict on both counts.

(History.com)

David Henley was the first person to receive a court-martial trail in the American military, on this day in 1778 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Henley was a colonel in the Continental Army and a prisoner of war commandant. British prisoners from the Battle of Saratoga were under his jurisdiction and he was accused by British Lt. Gen. John Burgoyne of “a general tenor of language and conduct heinously criminal as an officer; and unbecoming a man; of the most indecent, violent, vindictive severity against unarmed men; and of intentional murder.” He described an incident in the barracks during which a prisoner was defiant and uncooperative toward Henley and so the colonel stabbed him with a bayonet. Henley was acquitted on Feb. 25.

(Evans Early American Imprint Collection)

On this day in 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower ended his presidential term by warning the nation about the increasing power of the military-industrial complex. His remarks, issued during a televised farewell address to the American people, were particularly significant since Eisenhower had famously served the nation as military commander of the Allied forces during WWII. He urged his successors to strike a balance between a strong national defense and diplomacy in dealing with the Soviet Union. He did not suggest arms reduction and in fact acknowledged that the bomb was an effective deterrent to nuclear war. However, cognizant that America’s peacetime defense policy had changed drastically since his military career, Eisenhower expressed concerns about the growing influence of what he termed the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower cautioned that the federal government’s collaboration with an alliance of military and industrial leaders, though necessary, was vulnerable to abuse of power, and he then counseled American citizens to be vigilant in monitoring the military-industrial complex. He also recommended restraint in consumer habits, particularly with regard to the environment. “As we peer into society’s future, we–you and I, and our government–must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow,” he said. “We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.”

(History.com)

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act mandates that most positions within the federal government should be awarded on the basis of merit instead of political patronage. The law provided for the selection of some government employees by competitive exams, rather than ties to politicians or political affiliation. It also made it illegal to fire or demote these government officials for political reasons and created the U.S. Civil Service Commission to enforce the merit system. By the late 1870s, American politics operated on the spoils system, a political patronage practice in which officeholders awarded their allies with government jobs in return for financial and political support. In 1880, Ohio Democratic Sen. George Pendleton introduced legislation, which initially only applied to about 10% of federal employees but it now covers most federal employees. After a scandal involving government officials and contractors overpaid for star postal routes was exposed, as well as President James Garfield’s assassination by a deranged office seeker, public demand for reform increased. Though he had originally opposed civil service reform and had even benefited from the spoils system, President Chester Arthur signed the Pendleton Act on Jan. 16, 1883.

(Wikipedia)

The Pentagon, headquarters of the Defense Department and a symbol of the U.S. military, was dedicated at its Arlington County, Virginia, site on Jan. 15, 1943. The building was designed by American architect George Bergstrom and built by contractor John McShain on a site bordered by five roadways, which inspired the pentagon shape. Ground was broken on Sept. 11, 1941, and it was originally supposed to be temporary; Army Brig. Gen. Brehon Sommervell pitched it as a short-term solution to the then-War Department’s critical shortage of space as the threat of joining World War II became imminent and then to be turned into a hospital, office or warehouse once the war was over. It is the world’s largest office building, with about 6.5 million square feet of space, of which 3.7 million square feet are used as offices. Some 23,000 military and civilian employees, and another 3,000 non-defense support personnel work in the Pentagon. It has a total of 17.5 miles of corridors and its central 5-acre pentagonal plaza is nicknamed “ground zero.”

(Wikipedia)

Starting Jan. 14, 1969, a major fire and series of explosions broke out aboard the USS Enterprise off the coast of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The fire started when a Zuni rocket detonated under a plane’s wing. It spread as more munitions exploded, blowing holes in the flight deck that allowed burning jet fuel to enter the ship. The ship was completed in 1961 and was the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Her enormous construction cost caused the cancellation of the five other carriers planned for the class, so many of her features were unique. At the time of teh explosions, the ship was the ship was conducting a final battle drill and Operational Readiness Inspection before steaming for Vietnam. Twenty-eight sailors were killed, 314 were injured, 15 aircraft were destroyed, and the total cost of aircraft replacement and shipboard repair was over $126 million. The nuclear-powered cruiser Bainbridge and destroyer Rogers came to the stricken carrier’s aid. It took the combined crews of the three ships about four hours to extinguish the fires.

(Wikipedia)

On Jan. 13, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Robert C. Weaver head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, making him the first African-American Cabinet member. In keeping with his vision for a Great Society, Johnson sought to improve race relations and eliminate urban blight. As many of the country’s African Americans lived in run-down inner-city areas, appointing Weaver was an attempt to show his African American constituency that he meant business on both counts. Prior to his appointment as HUD secretary, Weaver had advised the secretary of the interior and served as a special assistant with the Housing Authority during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. He had also served on the National Defense Advisory Commission and worked to mobilize black workers during World War II. From 1955 to 1959, Weaver served as rent commissioner for the state of New York, then went on to serve as head of the Housing and Home Finance Agency under President John F. Kennedy. As HUD’s senior administrator, Weaver expanded affordable housing programs and, in 1968, advocated for the passage of the Fair Housing Act.

(History.com)

On Jan. 10, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt introduced the lend-lease program to Congress. The plan was intended to help Britain beat back Hitler’s advance while keeping America only indirectly involved in World War II. Britain was cash-strapped and desperately needed airplanes, tanks and ships. Roosevelt had been committed to abiding by Americans’ wishes to stay out of the conflict but the lend-lease program provided for military aid to any country whose defense was vital to US security. The understanding was that, after the war, America would be paid back in kind. Congress overwhelmingly accepted the plan, which only staunch isolationists opposed. Roosevelt’s program enabled the U.S. military to prepare for the growing threat of Japan on its Pacific flank while helping Britain to contain Hitler across the Atlantic, as it permitted aid to Europe without committing American troops that might be needed in a Pacific war. Even though Roosevelt’s plan did not require immediate repayment, America commandeered what was left of Britain’s gold reserves and overseas investments to help pay for the increased defense production.

(History.com)

Gen. Douglas MacArthur and the American 6th Army landed on the Lingayen Gulf of Luzon on Jan. 9, 1945, another step in the capture of the Philippine Islands from the Japanese during World War II. The Japanese controlled the Philippines from May 1942, when the defeat of American forces led to General MacArthur’s departure and Gen. Jonathan Wainwright’s capture. But in October 1944, more than 100,000 American soldiers landed on Leyte Island to launch one of one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific war, and to herald the beginning of the end for Japan. Newsreels captured MacArthur wading ashore at Leyte on Oct. 20, but it took 67 days to subdue the island, with the loss of more than 55,000 Japanese soldiers during the two months of battle and approximately 25,000 more soldiers killed in smaller-scale engagements necessary to fully clear the area of enemy troops. The U.S. forces lost about 3,500. The sea battle of Leyte Gulf was the same story, but the victories allowed more than 60,000 American troops to land on Luzon on Jan. 9. Once again, cameras recorded MacArthur walking ashore.

(History.com)

On this day in 1835, President Andrew Jackson achieved his goal of entirely paying off the country’s national debt. It was the only time in US history that the national debt stood at $0, and it precipitated one of the worst financial crises in American history. Since the time of the Revolution, American politicians had argued over the wisdom of the nation carrying debt. After independence, the federal government agreed to take on individual states’ war debts as part of the unification of the former colonies. Federalists who favored a stronger central government established a national bank and argued that debt could be a useful way of fueling the new country’s economy. Their opponents, most notably Thomas Jefferson, felt that these policies favored Northeastern elites at the expense of rural Americans and saw the debt as a source of national shame. Jackson, a populist whose Democratic Party grew out of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, had a personal aversion to debt. He vetoed the re-charter of the national bank, as well as a number of spending bills throughout his tenure, putting an end to projects that would have expanded nationwide infrastructure. He further paid down the debt by selling off vast amounts of government land in the West, and was able to settle the debt entirely in 1835.

(History.com)

Congress set Jan. 7, 1789, as the date by which states were required to choose electors for the country’s first-ever presidential election. A month later, on Feb. 4, George Washington was elected president by state electors and sworn into office on April 30 that year. As in 1789, the U.S. still uses the Electoral College system, established by the Constitution, which today gives all American citizens over the age of 18 the right to vote for electors, who in turn vote for the president. The president and vice president are the only elected federal officials chosen by the Electoral College instead of by direct popular vote. Today political parties usually nominate their slate of electors at their state conventions or by a vote of the party’s central state committee, with party loyalists often being picked for the job. Members of Congress, though, can’t be electors. Each state is allowed to choose as many electors as it has senators and representatives in Congress.

(History.com)

President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced to Congress that he was authorizing the largest armaments production in the history of the U.S. on this date in 1942, about a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor which pushed the country fully into World War II. With the nation’s Pacific fleet decimated by the Japanese air raid, Lord William Beaverbrook, the British minister of aircraft production, and members of the British Ministry of Supplies, met their American counterparts in Washington and pressed Roosevelt to double U.S. armaments and industrial production. Beaverbrook preached ways of circumventing red tape to boost efficiency. The president announced to Congress that the first year of the supercharged production schedule would result in 45,000 aircraft, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft guns, and 8 million tons in new ships. Congressmen were stunned at the proposal.

(History.com)

On this day in 1947, the first live television broadcast from the House Chamber occurred during the opening session of the 80th Congress. The two-hour broadcast appeared on a local television station and was transmitted to Philadelphia and New York. The broadcast captured the ritual of opening day ceremonies and concluded after Speaker Joseph Martin’s opening address. The House had adopted a rule that television broadcasts could not be made when members discussed legislative business in the chamber. President Harry Truman watched the proceedings on a special 10-inch television set installed in the Oval Office, in preparation for his own scheduled State of the Union message — the first to be televised — in the Chamber three days later. Broadcasts of committee hearings began a year later, with cameras becoming more common throughout the 1950s and 1960s. On March 19, 1979, C-SPAN went live with the first broadcast of a full House floor session, and seven years later live broadcasts of Senate proceedings began.

(U.S. House of Representatives/Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education)

Alice Sanger, a stenographer with President Benjamin Harrison’s law firm in Indianapolis, became the first female to serve on a president’s executive staff as a clerk typist on Jan. 2, 1890. Sanger first appeared on the White House payroll in 1889 and was a personal friend of First Lady Caroline Harrison and a fellow member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. It’s uncertain whether Sanger’s appointment was meant to appeal to the growing women’s suffrage movement — that same year two of the most influential such organizations combined forces and became the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which demanded stronger female property rights, employment and educational opportunities for women, improved divorce and child custody laws and reproductive freedom. Sanger’s own opinions on the movement are unknown. She can be seen in the above photo at the second desk from the left in the back.

(Library of Congress via White House Historical Association/History.com)

On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the middle of the Civil War, ending slavery in Confederate states. It was a calculated decision regarding the institution of slavery in America, and its vague wording included loopholes such as ignoring border states. Republican abolitionists in the North rejoiced the move, and slaves in the south slowly began to liberate themselves as Union armies marched into Confederate territory. Many white northerners worried the law would encourage blacks to move north and become competition for jobs, but Britain and France were dissuaded from pursuing diplomatic relations with the Confederacy as a result. It also inspired John Wilkes Booth to assassinate the president a few years later.

(History.com)

On Dec. 31, 1999, the U.S., in accordance with the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, officially handed over control of the Panama Canal, putting the strategic waterway into Panamanian hands for the first time. Crowds of Panamanians celebrated the transfer of the 50-mile canal, which links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and officially opened when the SS Arcon sailed through on Aug. 15, 1914. Since then, over 922,000 ships have used the canal. The desire for a shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific originated with explorers in the early 1500s. But U.S. interest in building a canal was sparked with the expansion of the American West and the California gold rush in 1848. In 1880 a French company started digging a canal across the Isthmus of Panama and sold its project rights to the U.S. in 1902. In 1903, Panama declared its independence from Colombia in a U.S.-backed revolution and the U.S. and Panama signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, in which the U.S. agreed to pay Panama a perpetual lease on land for the canal. In 1977, responding to nearly 20 years of Panamanian protest, U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Panama’s General Omar Torrijos signed two new treaties that replaced the original 1903 agreement and called for a transfer of canal control in 1999.

(History.com)

On this day in 1862, the USS Monitor sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Just nine months earlier, the ship had been part of a revolution in naval warfare when the ironclad dueled to a standstill with the CSS Virginia (Merrimack) off Hampton Roads, Virginia, in one of the most famous naval battles in the Civil War — the first time two ironclads faced each other in a naval engagement. By December 1862, it was clear the Monitor was no longer needed in Virginia, so she was sent to Beaufort, North Carolina, to join a fleet being assembled for an attack on Charleston, South Carolina. The Monitor served well in the sheltered waters of Chesapeake Bay, but the heavy, low-slung ship was a poor craft for the open sea. As the Monitor pitched and swayed in the rough seas, the caulking around the gun turret loosened and water began to leak into the hull. Many of the sailors were rescued, but some men were terrified to venture onto the deck in such rough seas. The ironclad’s pumps stopped working and the ship sank before 16 crew members could be rescued.

(History.com)

Christmas morning of 1968, nine-and-a-half Moon orbits and 3 days, 17 hours and 17 seconds after launch, the Apollo 8 crew fired its service module engines to propel them out of lunar orbit and back to their families at home.

Splashdown went as planned on the morning of Dec. 27. The crew, still confined to the Apollo capsule, awaited the Navy men aboard USS Yorktown, who were instructed to rendezvous with the battered spaceship rather than to return home for Christmas.

(NASA)

Former U.S. President Gerald Ford dies at age 93. Ford was the only unelected president in America’s history.

Patriot General George Washington crosses the Delaware River during the American Revolution.

(Wikipedia)

The Treaty of Peace and Amity between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America is signed by British and American representatives at Ghent, Belgium, ending the War of 1812. By terms of the treaty, all conquered territory was to be returned, and commissions were planned to settle the boundary of the United States and Canada.

(History.com)

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, exercising the traditional Christmastime practice by presidents, pardoned all persons who had been convicted under the Espionage Act and the Selective Service Act during World War I. Amnesty (as opposed to pardon) for WW I political prisoners had been an issue for civil libertarians since the end of the war. (In fact, the term “political prisoner” is itself a political term that has no standing in the law.) Led by the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin, a coalition of groups created the General Amnesty Campaign on June 11, 1922.

(Today in Civil Liberties History)

On December 20, 1957, while spending the Christmas holidays at Graceland, his newly purchased Tennessee mansion, rock-and-roll star Elvis Presley receives his draft notice for the United States Army.

With a suggestive style–one writer called him “Elvis the Pelvis”–a hit movie, Love Me Tender, and a string of gold records including “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel,” Presley had become a national icon, and the world’s first bona fide rock-and-roll star, by the end of 1956. As the Beatles’ John Lennon once famously remarked: “Before Elvis, there was nothing.” The following year, at the peak of his career, Presley received his draft notice for a two-year stint in the army. Fans sent tens of thousands of letters to the army asking for him to be spared, but Elvis would have none of it. He received one deferment–during which he finished working on his movie King Creole–before being sworn in as an army private in Memphis on March 24, 1958.

(History.com)

Almost 21 years ago to the day before the House voted to impeach President Donald Trump, President Bill Clinton became the second U.S. president to be impeached on Dec. 19, 1998. After nearly 14 hours of debate, the House approved two articles of impeachment against Clinton, charging him with lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. In November 1995, Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old unpaid intern, which lasted for a year and a half. In April 1996, Lewinsky was transferred to the Pentagon and that summer, she first confided in co-worker Linda Tripp about her sexual relationship with the president. In 1997, with the relationship over, Tripp began secretly to record conversations with Lewinsky, in which Lewinsky gave Tripp details about the affair. In December, lawyers for Paula Jones, who was suing the president on sexual harassment charges, subpoenaed Lewinsky. In January 1998, allegedly under the recommendation of the president, Lewinsky filed an affidavit in which she denied ever having had a sexual relationship with him. Tripp, wired by FBI agents working with Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, met with Lewinsky again, and on Jan. 16 Lewinsky was taken by FBI agents and U.S. attorneys to a hotel room where she was questioned and offered immunity if she cooperated with the prosecution. A few days later, the story broke, and Clinton publicly denied the allegations, saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” On Sept. 9, Starr submitted his report and 18 boxes of supporting documents to the House, which were released to the public two days later. On Dec. 11, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment and eight days later the House impeached Clinton.

(History.com)

Following its ratification by the requisite three-quarters of the states earlier in the month, the 13th Amendment is formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution, ensuring that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude… shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

(History.com)

During World War II, U.S. Major General Henry C. Pratt issues Public Proclamation No. 21, declaring that, effective January 2, 1945, Japanese American “evacuees” from the West Coast could return to their homes.

On February 19, 1942, 10 weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any or all people from military areas “as deemed necessary or desirable.” The military in turn defined the entire West Coast, home to the majority of Americans of Japanese ancestry or citizenship, as a military area. By June, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to remote internment camps built by the U.S. military in scattered locations around the country. For the next two and a half years, many of these Japanese Americans endured extremely difficult living conditions and poor treatment by their military guards.

During the course of World War II, 10 Americans were convicted of spying for Japan, but not one of them was of Japanese ancestry. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill to recompense each surviving internee with a tax-free check for $20,000 and an apology from the U.S. government.

On this day 19 years ago, President-elect George W. Bush announced his nomination of Colin Powell to become secretary of state, the first African American to hold the Cabinet position. Hearings were held Jan. 17, 2001, and Powell was confirmed by a voice vote in the Senate three days later. Powell was a retired four-star Army general who had previously served as National Security Advisor, commander of the Army Forces Command, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the latter of which during Operation Desert Storm of the Persian Gulf War. He is the son of Jamaican immigrants, grew up in the South Bronx in New York City, and graduated from the City College of New York before receiving a commission as an Army second lieutenant upon graduation. During the Gulf War, media dubbed his approach “The Powell Doctrine,” which emphasizes U.S. national security interests, overwhelming strike capabilities with an emphasis on ground forces, and widespread public support in order to decide whether to go to war. However, in his 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council to garner international support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he presented what was later reported to be faulty evidence of biological weapons or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Two months before resigning in 2004, Powell told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee that the sources who provided much of the information in his UN presentation were wrong, and pushed for reform in the intelligence community, including the creation of a national intelligence director who would assure that “what one person knew, everyone else knew.”

(Wikipedia)

After spending nine months on the run, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was captured on December 13, 2003. Saddam’s downfall began on March 20, 2003, when the United States led an invasion force into Iraq to topple his government, which had controlled the country for more than 20 years. U.S. soldiers found Saddam Hussein hiding in a six-to-eight-foot deep hole, nine miles outside his hometown of Tikrit.

(History.com)

On this day in 1791, the First Bank of the United States opened for business in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia, then the seat of the federal government. The new bank was a national institution engineered by the first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and authorized by Congress to hold $10 million in capital — an astronomical sum at the time — and operate across state borders. The bank was quasi-public, owned mostly by businessmen and lawyers motivated by profit but also intended to serve the public interest by improving the financial standing of the federal government and fostering economic growth. In July of that year a public offering of bank stock sold out in less than an hour, setting off frenzied speculation in bank shares. By December, it was ready to begin accepting deposits, making loans, selling U.S. Treasury bonds and issuing paper currency backed by gold and silver coin stored in its vaults. Bank branches were established the following year in different cities. It received serious push back from anti-Federalists especially Thomas Jefferson.

(Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis)

Apollo 17 was the final mission of NASA’s Apollo program and remains the most recent time humans have travelled beyond low Earth orbit. Its crew consisted of Commander Eugene Cernan, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, and Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and the spacecraft carried a biological experiment containing five pocket mice with radiation monitors implanted under their scalps. The lunar module touched down on the moon’s surface on Dec. 11, 1972. Shortly thereafter, Cernan and Schmitt began re-configuring the module for their stay on the surface and began preparations for the first moonwalk of the mission, or EVA-1. Cernan, Evans, Schmitt, and the mice returned to Earth on Dec. 19, although one of the animals died of reasons undetermined. The mission broke several crewed spaceflight records including the longest Moon landing, longest total extravehicular activities, the largest lunar sample, the longest time in lunar orbit, and, at 75, the most lunar orbits.

(Wikipedia)

On Dec. 10, 1920, the Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to President Woodrow Wilson for his work in ending World War I and creating the League of Nations. Wilson’s involvement in devising a plan to prevent future international conflict began in January 1918 when he laid out his “Fourteen Points.” The plan addressed specific territorial issues in Europe, equal trade conditions, arms reduction and national sovereignty for former colonies of Europe’s weakening empires, but the primary thrust of his policy was to create an international organization that would arbitrate peaceful solutions to conflicts between nations. Wilson’s Fourteen Points not only laid the foundation for the peace agreement signed by France, Britain and Germany at the end of the Great War but also formed the basis for American foreign policy in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Although the League of Nations never materialized, largely due to the fact that it was never ratified by the U.S. Congress, it formed the blueprint for the United Nations, which was established after the Second World War.

(History.com)

On December 9, 1992, 1,800 United States Marines arrive in Mogadishu, Somalia, to spearhead a multinational force aimed at restoring order in the conflict-ridden country.

(History.com)

On Dec. 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, officially ending the institution of slavery, was ratified. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The ratification came eight months after the end of the Civil War, but it represented the culmination of the struggle against slavery. When the war began, some in the North were against fighting what they saw as a crusade to end slavery. Although many northern Democrats and conservative Republicans were opposed to slavery’s expansion, they were ambivalent about outlawing the institution entirely. By 1862, Lincoln realized that it was folly to wage such a bloody war without plans to eliminate slavery. In September 1862, following the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves in territory still in rebellion on Jan. 1, 1863, would be declared forever free. The move was largely symbolic, as it only freed slaves in areas outside of Union control, but it changed the conflict from a war for the reunification of the states to a war whose objectives included the destruction of slavery.

(History.com)

On this day in 1945, five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 took off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission due east for 120 miles, north for 73 miles, and then back for 120 miles to the naval base. They never returned. Two hours after the flight began, the leader of the squadron reported that his compass and back-up compass had failed and that his position was unknown. The other planes experienced similar instrument malfunctions. Radio facilities on land were contacted to find the location of the lost squadron, but none were successful. After two more hours of confused messages from the fliers, a distorted radio transmission from the squadron leader was heard apparently calling for his men to prepare to ditch their aircraft simultaneously because of lack of fuel. A search and rescue Mariner aircraft took off with a 13-man crew. Three minutes later, the Mariner aircraft radioed to its home base that its mission was underway. The Mariner was never heard from again. Later, there was a report from a tanker cruising off the coast of Florida of a visible explosion not long after the Mariner took off. The disappearance of the 14 men of Flight 19 and the 13 men of the Mariner led to one of the largest air and seas searches to that date, with hundreds of ships and aircraft combing thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and remote locations within the interior of Florida. No trace of the bodies or aircraft was ever found.

(History.com)

Gemini 7 was the fourth crewed flight in NASA’s Gemini program. It launched Dec. 4, 1965, with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell aboard who spent nearly 14 days in space, making a total of 206 orbits. Gemini 7 was always planned to be a long duration flight, investigating the effects of fourteen days in space on the human body. This doubled the length of time that anyone had been in space and stood as the longest spaceflight duration record for five years. This required NASA to solve some of the problems of long-duration space flight, such as stowage of waste and timing the crew’s  workday to match that of the prime shift ground crews; both men worked and slept at the same time. Gemini 7 conducted 20 experiments, the most of any Gemini mission, including studies of nutrition in space. The astronauts also evaluated a lightweight spacesuit, the G5C, which proved uncomfortable. The high point of the mission came on the 11th day with the rendezvous with Gemini 6A. This was rescheduled to occur concurrently with Gemini 7’s flight due to problems with an earlier Gemini 6 mission.

(Wikipedia)

Andrew Jackson was elected the seventh U.S. president on this day in 1828, having defeated John Quincy Adams after losing to him in the close 1824 race. Jackson was a soldier and slave-owning planter who had gained fame as a general in the War of 1812 and for his military campaign against Seminole and Spanish resistance in Florida. He was known for having a combative, tough personality — earning the nickname “Old Hickory” — and advocated for what he considered the rights of the “common man” against a “corrupt aristocracy,” and the system of government appointments. Although he also used a spoils system of government that awarded political supporters with positions. He worked to preserve the Union against Southern secession, advocated states rights and agrarian protections. He is also remembered for his Native American removal policies including the deadly Trail of Tears. He tried to abolish the Electoral College and advocated limiting presidential terms to one, though he served two terms, and his administration expanded trade with other countries.

(Wikipedia)

The Environmental Protection Agency was inspired by a rise in public concern about the impact of human activity on the environment in the 1950s and 1960s. On July 9, 1970, President Richard Nixon proposed an executive reorganization that consolidated many environmental responsibilities of the federal government under one agency, and merged antipollution programs from a number of organizations, such as the combination of pesticide programs from the departments of Agriculture and Interior. After conducting hearings during that summer, the House and Senate approved the proposal. The EPA was created 90 days before it had to operate, and officially opened its doors on Dec. 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. At its start, the EPA was primarily a technical assistance agency that set goals and standards. Soon, new acts and amendments passed by Congress gave the agency its regulatory authority. EPA staff recall that in the early days there was “an enormous sense of purpose and excitement,” leading to tens of thousands of resumes from those eager to participate in the mighty effort to clean up America’s environment. When EPA first began operation, members of the private sector felt strongly that the environmental protection movement was a passing fad. The agency’s first Administrator William Ruckelshaus stated that he felt pressure to show a skeptical public that the EPA could respond effectively to widespread concerns about pollution.

(Wikipedia)

Dwight D. Eisenhower  had promised during his presidential campaign that if elected he would go to Korea to see whether he could find the key to ending the bitter and frustrating Korean War. He kept his plans vague yet on this day in 1952, the president-elect traveled for a short stay in the country. After taking office, Eisenhower adopted a get-tough policy toward the communists in Korea. He suggested that he would “unleash” the Nationalist Chinese forces on Taiwan against communist China, and he sent only slightly veiled messages that he would use any force necessary – including the use of nuclear weapons – to bring the war to an end unless peace negotiations moved forward. The Chinese, exhausted by more than two years of war, finally agreed to terms and an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. The U.S. suffered over 50,000 casualties in this “forgotten war,” and spent nearly $70 billion. It was also America’s first experience with a “limited war,” one in which the nation neither sought nor obtained absolute victory over the enemy.

(History.com)

On Nov. 28, 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt joined British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at a conference in Iran to discuss strategies for winning World War II and potential terms for a peace settlement. Tehran was chosen as the site for the talks largely due to its strategic importance to the Allies – the U.S. was able to get supplies to the Soviets through Iran when Germany controlled most of Europe and North Africa, and German U-boats were attacking Allied shipping. The “Big Three,” as the leaders were known, discussed ways to defeat Nazi Germany and agreed upon an invasion of Normandy, codenamed Operation Overlord, which was launched in June 1944. In return for America’s help in defeating Germany on the eastern front, Stalin promised to help the U.S. win its war against Japan. The meeting was so friendly that Churchill later expressed unease at Roosevelt’s extraordinary effort to charm and accommodate Stalin.

(History.com)

According to U.S. Army regulation 10–44, the mission of the Army War College is “To prepare selected military, civilian, and international leaders for the responsibilities of strategic leadership; educate current and future leaders on the development and employment of landpower in a joint, multinational and interagency environment; conduct research and publish on national security and military strategy; and engage in activities in support of the Army’s strategic communication efforts.” Motivated by the experiences of the Spanish–American War, the ollege was founded by Secretary of War Elihu Root and President Theodore Roosevelt when General Order 155 was signed on Nov. 27, 1901. Washington Barracks, now called Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C., was chosen as the site. The first students attended the College in 1904. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson accused students and staff of planning for taking part in an offensive war, even though the country had not entered World War I. College President Montgomery Macomb tried to convince Wilson that the college was concerned only with the intellectual growth and professional development of its students. But Wilson was not persuaded, and insisted that the school curtail its activities in order to ensure that the U.S. maintained its neutrality. The College remained at Washington Barracks until the 1940s, when it was closed due to World War II. It reopened in 1950 at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, and moved one year later to its present location in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

(Wikipedia)

The tradition of celebrating the holiday on Thursday dates back to the early history of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, when post-harvest holidays were celebrated on the weekday regularly set aside as “Lecture Day,” a midweek church meeting where topical sermons were presented. Thanksgiving became an annual custom throughout New England in the 17th century, and in 1789, George Washington became the first president to proclaim a Thanksgiving holiday. At the request of Congress, he proclaimed Nov. 26, a Thursday, as a day of national thanksgiving for the U.S. Constitution. Then in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to officially fall on the last Thursday of November. With a few deviations, Lincoln’s precedent was followed annually by every subsequent president until 1939. FDR departed from tradition for the next two years, to unpopular reception, but on Nov. 26, 1941, he conceded and signed a bill into law officially making the fourth Thursday in November the national holiday of Thanksgiving Day.

(History.com)

The Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought on June 25, 1876, between federal troops led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, a popular Civil War figure, and a band of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Sitting Bull. Tensions between the two groups had been rising since the discovery of gold on Native American lands, and when several tribes did not move to reservations per US demands, Custer and his 7th Calvary, confronted them at Little Bighorn. But the Army was outnumbered and quickly overwhelmed in what became known as Custer’s Last Stand. When news of the federal defeat reached east, many Americans demanded an intensified military campaign against the Native Americans. Gen. Ranald Mackenzie led an expeditionary force to a village of Cheyenne living with Chief Dull Knife, who himself was likely not involved in the battle at Little Bighorn. Mackenzie and over 1,000 soldiers and 400 Indian scouts opened fire on the sleeping village, killing many Natives within the first few minutes. The surviving Cheyenne began an 11-day walk north to the Tongue River where Crazy Horse’s camp of Oglalas took them in.

(History.com)

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on this day in 1963 while traveling through Dallas, Texas, in an open-top convertible. Riding with First lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife for a 10-mile motorcade through downtown, the Kennedys and Connallys waved at the crowds gathered along the parade route. As their vehicle passed the Texas School Book Depository Building at 12:30 p.m., Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired three shots from the sixth floor, fatally wounding the president and seriously injuring the governor. Kennedy was pronounced dead 30 minutes later at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital. He was 46 years old. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who was three cars behind Kennedy in the motorcade, was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States at 2:39 p.m. He took the presidential oath of office aboard Air Force One as it sat on the runway at Dallas Love Field airport, witnessed by some 30 people, including Jacqueline Kennedy, who was still wearing clothes stained with her husband’s blood. Seven minutes later, the presidential jet took off for Washington.

(History.com)

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet-switching network and the first network to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the internet. The ARPANET was initially founded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department, and was operated by the military during the two decades of its existence, until 1990. The first successful host to host connection on the ARPANET was made between Stanford Research Institute programmer Bill Duvall, and UCLA student programmer Charley Kline on Oct. 29, 1969. Kline connected from UCLA’s SDS Sigma 7 Host computer, in Boelter Hall room 3420, to the Institute’s SDS 940 Host computer. Kline typed the command “login,” and about an hour later, after Duvall adjusted parameters on the SDS 940, Kline successfully logged in to the SDS 940. Hence, the first two characters successfully transmitted over the ARPANET were “lo.” The first permanent ARPANET link was established on Nov. 21, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By Dec. 5 the initial four-node network was established.

(Wikipedia)

From Nov. 20, 1969, to June 11, 1971, 89 Native Americans and their supporters occupied Alcatraz Island in a 19-month-long protest. Led by Richard Oakes, LaNada Means, and others, and with John Trudell as the group’s spokesman, they lived on the island in San Francisco Bay together until the federal government shut down the operation. The group identified as the Indians of All Tribes and claimed that, under the Treaty of Fort Laramie between the U.S. and the Lakota tribe, all retired, abandoned, or out-of-use federal land was returned to the Indians who once occupied it. Since Alcatraz penitentiary had been closed on March 21, 1963, and the island declared surplus federal property in 1964, activists felt that the island qualified for a reclamation by Natives. At the height of the occupation there were 400 people on Alcatraz, including students and children. Native and non-native people brought food and other necessities to the island, but a Coast Guard blockade made it increasingly difficult to supply the occupants with food. Means — one of the first and last on the island — made it clear to the media that the group wanted complete control over Alcatraz to build a cultural center that included Native American Studies, an American Indian spiritual center, an ecology center, and an American Indian Museum. The occupation affected federal assimilation, or Indian Termination, policies and established a precedent for Native American activism.

(Wikipedia) (photo courtesy Golden Gate National Recreation Area/National Park Service)

On Nov. 19, 1863, at the dedication of a military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most memorable speeches in American history. In fewer than 275 words, Lincoln inspired the Union to fight on and win the Civil War. The Battle of Gettysburg, fought some four months earlier, was the single bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Although a Union victory, in three days more than 45,000 men were killed, injured, captured or went missing. The battle also proved to be the turning point of the war, as Gen. Robert E. Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg marked the last Confederate invasion of Northern territory. An attorney named David Wills bought 17 acres of pasture, at the direction of Pennsylvania’s governor, to turn into a cemetery for the fallen. Wills invited Edward Everett, one of the most famous orators of the day, to deliver a speech at the cemetery’s dedication. Lincoln’s invitation was somewhat an afterthought. At the dedication, the crowd listened for two hours to Everett before Lincoln spoke. Lincoln’s address lasted just two or three minutes. The speech reflected his redefined belief that the Civil War was not just a fight to save the Union, but a struggle for freedom and equality for all, an idea Lincoln had not championed in the years leading up to the war.

(History.com)

After nearly a year of hearings into the Iran-Contra scandal, the joint congressional investigating committee issued its final report. It concluded that the scandal, involving a complicated plan whereby some of the funds from secret weapons sales to Iran were used to finance the Contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, was one in which the administration of Ronald Reagan exhibited “secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law.” Naming several members of the Reagan administration as having been directly involved in the scheme, including National Security Adviser John Poindexter and deceased CIA Director William Casey, the report stated that Reagan must bear “ultimate responsibility.” A number of government officials were charged and convicted of various crimes associated with the scandal. A minority opinion by some of the Republican members of the committee contained in the report argued that the hearings had been politically motivated. They also suggested that while Reagan administration officials might have used poor judgment, the ultimate end — continuing the fight against the leftist regime in Nicaragua — was a worthy goal. The differences in opinion posed a question that had plagued US policymakers throughout the Cold War: In the battle against communism, did the ends justify the means?

(History.com)

After 16 months of debate, the Continental Congress agreed to adopt the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union on Nov. 15, 1777. It became law on March 1, 1781, when Maryland became the 13th and last state to ratify the document. Patriot leaders had been reluctant to establish any form of government that might infringe on the right of individual states to govern their own affairs. The Articles of Confederation provided for only a loose federation of American states. Congress was a single house, with each state having one vote, and a president elected to chair the assembly. Although Congress did not have the right to levy taxes, it did have authority over foreign affairs and could regulate a national army and declare war and peace. Amendments to the Articles required approval from all 13 states. Less than five years after its ratification, enough leading Americans decided that the system was inadequate to the task of governance that they peacefully overthrew their second government in just over 20 years. On March 4, 1789, the modern United States was established when the Constitution formally replaced the Articles of Confederation.

(History.com)

Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the moon, launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Charles Conrad Jr.; Richard Gordon Jr.; and Alan Bean aboard on Nov. 14, 1969. Thirty-six seconds after takeoff, lightning struck the ascending Saturn 5 launch rocket, which tripped the circuit breakers in the command module and caused a power failure. Fortunately, the launching rocket continued up normally, and within a few minutes power was restored in the spacecraft. On Nov. 19, the landing module Intrepid made a precision landing on the northwest rim of the moon’s Ocean of Storms. About five hours later, Conrad and Bean became the third and fourth humans to walk on the surface of the moon. During the next 32 hours, the two astronauts made two lunar walks, collected lunar samples and investigated the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, an unmanned U.S. probe that soft-landed on the moon in 1967. On Nov. 24, Apollo 12 successfully returned to Earth, splashing down three miles from one of its retrieval ships, the USS Hornet.

(History.com)

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., on this day in 1982 after a march to its site by thousands of veterans of the conflict. Designed by Maya Lin, a Yale University architecture student who entered a nationwide competition to create a design for the monument, the memorial is a simple V-shaped black-granite wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939 Americans who died in the conflict, arranged in order of death, not rank, as was common in other memorials. Many veterans’ groups were opposed to Lin’s winning design, which lacked a standard memorial’s heroic statues and stirring words. However, a remarkable shift in public opinion occurred in the months after the memorial’s dedication. Veterans and families of the dead walked the black reflective wall, seeking the names of their loved ones killed in the conflict. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial soon became one of the most visited memorials in the nation’s capital, drawing together both those who fought and those who marched against the war for a kind of national healing.

(History.com)

On Nov. 12, 1954, Ellis Island shut it doors in New York Harbor after processing more than 12 million immigrants since opening in 1892. Today, an estimated 40% of all Americans can trace their roots through Ellis Island, named for merchant Samuel Ellis who owned the land in the 1770s. On Jan. 2, 1892, 15-year-old Annie Moore from Ireland became the first person to pass through the newly opened Ellis Island, which President Benjamin Harrison designated as America’s first federal immigration center in 1890. Before that time, the processing of immigrants had been handled by individual states. While first- and second-class passengers who arrived submitted to a brief shipboard inspection and then disembarked at the piers in New York or New Jersey, where they passed through customs, people in third class were transported to Ellis Island. They underwent medical and legal inspections to ensure they didn’t have a contagious disease or some condition that would make them a burden to the government. Only 2% of all immigrants were denied entrance into the U.S. Immigration to Ellis Island peaked between 1892 and 1924, and during the busiest year of operation, 1907, over 1 million people were processed there. World Wars I and II, and quotas established by the Immigration Act of 1924 reduced the influx until its closure.

(History.com)

At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ended. Germany faced imminent invasion and so signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. By the end of World War I, 9 million soldiers had died and 21 million were wounded, with Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, and Great Britain each losing nearly a million or more lives. In addition, at least 5 million civilians died from disease, starvation or exposure. The war is widely considered to have begun on June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, was shot to death with his wife by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Bosnia. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia — an ally of Russia — and France, allied with Russia, began to mobilize on Aug. 1. France and Germany declared war against each other on Aug. 3. After crossing through neutral Luxembourg, the German army invaded Belgium on the night of Aug. 3-4, prompting Great Britain, Belgium’s ally, to declare war against Germany. American troops joined Allied forces in 1917 and the following year the war turned in favor of Great Britain, France and Russia.

(History.com)

On Nov. 8, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt unveiled the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and put Harry L. Hopkins in charge of the short-term agency, a New Deal program created under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The new agency created construction jobs, principally improving or constructing buildings and bridges. The CWA ended on March 31, 1934, after spending $200 million per month and providing 4 million jobs.

(Wikipedia.com)

On this date in 2000, the presidential election between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George Bush resulted in a statistical tie. The results in Florida, Oregon and Wisconsin were unclear and/or too close to call by the end of election night and resulted in a recount and a Supreme Court case, Bush v. Gore, which ended the dispute in favor of Bush a month later. The election exposed several flaws and controversial elements of the American electoral process, and was the fourth of five U.S. presidential elections in which the winner lost the popular vote. In the national popular vote, then-Vice President Gore received 48.4% while Bush, the governor of Texas and son of former President George H. W. Bush, received 47.9%, losing by over 540,000 votes. However, US presidential elections use the Electoral College, which assigns “electoral votes” to states based on their population and then awards them as a lump sum to the winner of the popular vote in that state. Currently, it takes 270 electoral votes to win and by the end of Election Night, 2000, Gore’s tally stood at 250 while Bush’s was 246. The ensuing saga involved multiple legal battles, recounts and debates about the voting methods used. On Dec. 12, the Supreme Court ordered an end to the Florida recount and Gore conceded to Bush.

(History.com)

On Nov. 6, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt started a 17-day trip to Panama and Puerto Rico, marking the first official diplomatic tour outside of the continental United States by a president. Roosevelt’s demands for improvements and health care and better working conditions for workers on the Panama Canal helped drive the project forward when it appeared it was headed toward failure. The president’s trip to the construction site in 1906 helped to boost worker morale.

(History.com)

On Nov. 5, 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected for an unprecedented third presidential term. Roosevelt ran on a platform of maintaining American neutrality in foreign wars, but was prompted to take military action after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Certain wartime decisions by Roosevelt proved controversial, such as the demand of unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, which some claim prolonged the war.

(History.com)

On Nov. 4, 2008, Senator Barack Obama defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona to become the 44th US president, and the first African American elected to the White House. Obama garnered 365 electoral votes and nearly 53 percent of the popular vote, while McCain captured 173 electoral votes and more than 45 percent of the popular vote. Obama’s vice presidential running mate was Senator Joe Biden, while McCain’s running mate was Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, the first female Republican ever nominated for the vice presidency.

(History.com)

The United States detonated the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, on Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific on this day in 1952. The test gave the U.S. a short-lived advantage in the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. Following the successful Soviet detonation of an atomic device in September 1949, America accelerated its program to develop the next stage in atomic weaponry, a thermonuclear bomb. This new weapon was approximately 1,000 times more powerful than conventional nuclear devices. Opponents of development of the hydrogen bomb included J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. He and others argued that little would be accomplished except the speeding up of the arms race, since it was assumed that the Soviets would quickly follow suit. As predicted, the Soviet Union exploded a thermonuclear device the following year and by the late 1970s, seven nations had constructed hydrogen bombs.

(History.com)

On Oct. 31, 1864, Nevada became the 36th state in the union. Prior to US statehood, the territory had be inhabited primarily by Native Americans including the Paiute, Shoshone, Quoeech, Washoe and Walapai tribes. Spaniards arrived in the late 18th century, followed by American Mormons in the 1800s. It was a territory of Mexico until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made it part of the U.S. in 1848. Not long after, mining and cattle ranching drew settlers to the area which still lacked a strong federal presence. The provisional territorial government led to the creation of Nevada Territory by Congress in 1861. On March 2 of that year, the Nevada Territory separated from the Utah Territory and adopted its current name, which was shortened from Sierra Nevada, or Spanish for “snow-covered mountain range.” Eight days before the presidential election of 1864 Nevada became the 36th state in the union, despite having only about 10,000 residents — far less than the minimum requisite 60,000 residents for statehood, but approval was rushed to help President Abraham Lincoln’s chances at re-election; the area was economically tied to the Union rather than to the Confederacy. The Nevada constitution was sent to Washington by telegraph for $3,416.77 and a response from Washington came on Oct. 31, 1864.

(Wikipedia)

On Oct. 30, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, determined to keep the U.S. out of the war while helping those allies already mired in it, approved $1 billion in Lend-Lease loans to the Soviet Union. The terms were there would be no interest and repayment did not have to start until five years after the war was over. The Lend-Lease program was devised by Roosevelt and passed by Congress on March 11, 1941. Originally, it was meant to aid Great Britain in its war effort against the Germans by giving the chief executive the power to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” any military resources the president deemed ultimately in the interest of the defense of the U.S. The reasoning was that if a neighbor was successful in defending his home, the security of one’s own home was enhanced. Formal approval to extend the Lend-Lease program to the USSR had to be given by Congress. Anticommunist feeling meant much heated debate, but Congress finally gave its approval to the extension on Nov. 7. After the war, the Lend-Lease program morphed into the Marshall Plan, which allocated funds for the revitalization of “friendly” democratic nations, even if they were former enemies.

(History.com)

Launched in 1989 aboard space shuttle Atlantis, Galileo explored Jupiter and its moons. Upon arrival at Jupiter in December 1995, the Galileo spacecraft delivered a probe that descended into the giant planet’s atmosphere. The orbiter completed many flybys of Jupiter’s major moons, reaping a variety of science discoveries. The spacecraft launched Oct. 18, 1989, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in the cargo bay of space shuttle Atlantis. Galileo was then propelled onto its interplanetary flight path, traveling past Venus on Feb. 10, 1990, and then twice past Earth: Once on Dec. 8, 1990, and again on Dec. 8, 1992. While en route to Jupiter, Galileo flew close to two asteroids, the first such visits by any spacecraft. It encountered the asteroid Gaspra on Oct. 29, 1991, and the asteroid Ida on Aug. 28, 1993. During the latter part of its journey, Galileo was used to observe the collisions of fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in July 1994. The mission ended on Sept. 21, 2003, when the spacecraft plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

(NASA)

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on this day in 1998. The DMCA bill was heavily supported by the content industries — Hollywood, the music business and book publishers — during its legislative journey through Congress. It was written in order to strengthen existing federal copyright protections against new threats posed by the internet and by the democratization of high technology. But included in the legislation as it was eventually enacted was a “safe harbor” provision granting companies operating platforms for user-contributed content protection from liability for acts of copyright infringement by those users. It was this provision that the operators of file-sharing platforms like Grokster and Napster tried to hide behind during their unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves against DMCA-inspired litigation in the early 2000s. The DMCA explicitly authorized copyright holders to issue “takedown” notices to individuals or companies believed to be engaging in infringing use of a copyrighted work.

(History.com)

Photo: (Former Secretary of Labor Albert Fall (left), and Henry Sinclair (Mammoth Oil) at their trial.

On Oct. 25, 1929: Albert B. Fall, became the presidential cabinet member to be convicted of a crime while in office. As a hedge in the event of another war, the Navy held valuable oil reserves in Elk Hills in California, and at a remote site in Wyoming called Teapot Dome. Using his position as Secretary of the Interior, Fall was able to transfer control of the oil fields from the Navy to Interior, where he provided sweetheart leases to two friends Edward Doheny (Pan-American Petroleum) and Harry Sinclair) Mammoth Oil Company). In exchange, the oilmen provided Fall with kickbacks in the form of securities, cash and “loans” totaling a half-million dollars. In 1927, the oil fields were restored to the U.S. government by a Supreme Courto decision. Two years later, Fall was convicted of bribery and sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of $100,000. Doheny escaped conviction, but Sinclair was imprisoned for contempt of Congress and jury tampering.

(History.com)

On Oct. 24, 1921, U.S. Army Sgt. Edward F. Younger, who was wounded in combat, highly decorated for valor and received the Distinguished Service Medal in “The Great War, the war to end all wars,” selected the Unknown Soldier of World War I from four identical caskets at the city hall in Chalons-sur-Marne, France. The four unknowns had been exhumed from four World War I American cemeteries in France. The chosen unknown soldier was transported to the United States aboard the USS Olympia, then laid in state in the Capitol Rotunda until being interred on Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1921. President Warren G. Harding (in photo) officiated at the interment ceremonies at the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery.

(Arlington National Cemetary/ Photo:  US Army Military Institute

Early on a Sunday morning 36 years ago, a 19-ton Mercedes-Benz truck punched through a five-foot high concertina wire fence and into a four-story barracks housing Marines at the Beirut International Airport. The driver of Iranian descent set off an estimated 21,000 pounds of TNT which first lifted the structure off the ground and then collapsed into a mass of concrete rubble. When the dust had settled, 220 Marines with 1st Battalion, 8th Marines – Battalion Landing Team had perished along with 21 other service members, marking the deadliest day for the Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima in Feb., 1945. The Marines in Beirut were part of a multinational peacekeeping force that was trying to broker a truce between warring Christian and Muslim Lebanese factions. Four months after the bombing, American forces left Lebanon without retaliating.

(History.com)

 

On October 22, 1981, the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) as a union following an illegal strike that was broken by the Reagan Administration. According to labor historian Joseph A. McCartin, the 1981 strike and defeat of PATCO was “one of the most important events in late twentieth century U.S. labor history”. President Reagan fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers and banned them from federal service for life. They were replaced initially with non-participating  controllers, supervisors, staff personnel and some military controllers. Initially, the FAA claimed that staffing levels would be restored within two years; however, it too closer to ten years before the overall staffing levels returned to normal.

(Wikipedia)

 

The USS Constitution, also known as Old Ironsides and the oldest commissioned naval vessel still afloat in the world, launched from Boston Harbor on Oct. 21, 1797. The wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate was one of six original frigates authorized for construction by the Naval Act of 1794 and the third constructed. Joshua Humphreys designed the frigates to be the young American Navy’s capital ships, and so Constitution and her sisters ships were larger and more heavily armed and built than standard frigates of the period. Her first duties were to provide protection for American merchant shipping during the Quasi-War with France and to defeat the Barbary pirates in the First Barbary War. The vessel was retired from active service in 1881 and served as a receiving ship until being designated a museum ship in 1907. In 1934, she completed a three-year, 90-port tour of the nation. She sailed under her own power for her 200th birthday in 1997, and again in August 2012 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of her victory over the HMS Guerriere.

(Wikipedia)

On Oct. 18, 1867, the U.S. formally took possession of Alaska after purchasing the territory from Russia for $7.2 million, or less than two cents an acre. The Alaska purchase comprised 586,412 square miles, about twice the size of Texas, and was championed by William Henry Seward, the enthusiastically expansionist secretary of state under President Andrew Johnson. Russia wanted to sell its remote, sparsely populated Alaska territory, which was difficult to defend, rather than risk losing it in battle with a rival such as Great Britain. However, the American public believed the land to be barren and worthless and dubbed the purchase “Seward’s Folly” and “Andrew Johnson’s Polar Bear Garden,” among other derogatory names. Public opinion of the purchase turned more favorable when gold was discovered in a tributary of Alaska’s Klondike River in 1896, sparking a gold rush. Alaska became the 49th state on Jan. 3, 1959, and is now recognized for its vast natural resources. The name Alaska is derived from the Aleut word alyeska, which means “great land.” Alaska has two official state holidays to commemorate its origins: Seward’s Day, observed the last Monday in March, celebrates the March 30, 1867, signing of the land treaty between the U.S. and Russia, and Alaska Day, observed every Oct. 18, marks the anniversary of the formal land transfer.

(History.com)

On this day in 1974, President Gerald Ford explained to Congress why he had chosen to pardon his predecessor, Richard Nixon, rather than allow Congress to pursue legal action against the former president. Congress had accused Nixon of obstruction of justice during the investigation of the Watergate scandal, which began in 1972. White House tape recordings revealed that Nixon knew about and possibly authorized the bugging of the Democratic National Committee offices, located in the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. Rather than be impeached and removed from office, Nixon chose to resign on Aug. 8, 1974. When he assumed office on Aug. 9, 1974, Ford, referring to the Watergate scandal, announced that America’s “long national nightmare” was over. There were no historical or legal precedents to guide Ford in the matter of Nixon’s pending indictment, but after much thought, he decided to give Nixon a full pardon for all offenses against the United States in order to put the tragic and disruptive scandal behind all concerned. Ford justified this decision by claiming that a long, drawn-out trial would only have further polarized the public. Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon was condemned by many and is thought to have contributed to Ford’s failure to win the presidential election of 1976.

(History.com)

Known as the Taft-Díaz meeting, the visit between William Howard Taft and Mexican President Porfirio Díaz on Oct. 16, 1909, marked the first official state visit paid by a US president to the country. The meeting took place against a backdrop of increasing US activism in Latin America as well as the launch of the Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Díaz was under strong social pressures, facing serious political upheavals led by Emiliano Zapata in the south and Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north of the country. He hoped the meeting would show unconditional support from the U.S. Taft was mainly interested in protecting American companies’ investments in Mexico, which, by 1912 the American consul in Chihuahua calculated to be more than $1 trillion.

(Roosevelt Institute for American Studies)

Prior to the creation of the Transportation Department, the under secretary of Commerce for transportation administered the functions now associated with the DOT. Just before he left office in June 1965, Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Najeeb Halaby suggested to President Lyndon Johnson that transportation be elevated to a cabinet-level post, and that the FAA be folded into the DOT. In his January 1966 State of the Union address, Johnson announced his intention to do just that. Two months later, on March 6, 1966, he sent Congress a bill to establish DOT. After much compromise with Congress, Johnson signed into law the Transportation Department enabling act on Oct. 15, 1966. The final version of the bill left out the Maritime Administration, and the actions of the FAA administrator relating to safety, and the decisions of the National Transportation Safety Board were designated “administratively final” with appeals only to the courts. The reorganization created the fourth largest federal agency and brought approximately 95,000 employees in to the new organization. Thirty-one previously scattered federal elements were grouped under the wing of one cabinet department.

(DOT)

The Cuban Missile Crisis began on this day in 1962, bringing the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict. Photographs taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane offered incontrovertible evidence that Soviet-made medium-range missiles in Cuba — capable of carrying nuclear warheads — were stationed 90 miles off the American coastline. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union over Cuba had increased since the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in which Cuban refugees, armed and trained by the United States, landed in Cuba and attempted to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. During the next year, the number of Soviet advisers in Cuba rose to more than 20,000. Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev may have decided to so dramatically up the stakes in the Cold War for several reasons, including pressure at home and resentment over US nuclear missiles stationed near the Soviet Union in Turkey. Two days after the pictures were analyzed by intelligence officers, they were presented to President John F. Kennedy. During the next two weeks, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. came as close to nuclear war as they ever had.

(History.com)

NASA’s first crewed space mission, Apollo 7, launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Oct. 11, 1968, with Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham aboard. The mission objective was to demonstrate the Command and Service Module and support facilities’ performance with crew, as well as to measure Apollo rendezvous capability and transmit live TV broadcasts from space. Just over 10 minutes after launch, Apollo 7 achieved an elliptical orbit of 140-by-183 miles above Earth. Despite some mechanical mishaps and the fact that the crew suffered through colds, which were far more uncomfortable than if they had been on Earth with normal air pressure, the mission was a success and expanded the options for Apollo 8.

(NASA)

Less than a year before Richard Nixon’s resignation as president of the United States, Spiro Agnew became the first U.S. vice president to resign in disgrace on Oct. 10, 1973. The same day, he pleaded no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of political corruption. He was subsequently fined $10,000, sentenced to three years probation, and disbarred by the Maryland court of appeals. Agnew, a Republican, was elected chief executive of Baltimore County in 1961, then became governor in 1967 until the 1968 presidential election. He was reelected with Nixon in 1972, but resigned after the Justice Department uncovered widespread evidence of his political corruption, including allegations that his practice of accepting bribes had continued into his tenure as vice president. Under the process decreed by the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, Nixon nominated Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan, who had to be approved by both houses of Congress. Ford was sworn in on Dec. 6.

(History.com)

On Oct. 9, 1936, the Hoover Dam began sending electricity over transmission lines spanning 266 miles of mountains and deserts to Los Angeles. Initially named Boulder Dam, the public works project begun under President Herbert Hoover’s administration and was completed during the Roosevelt administration. At the time of its completion it was the tallest dam in the world. It was made of concrete and steel, and was a large-scale reclamation project designed to support growth and development of the arid West. The electricity generated by the rushing Colorado River was only a secondary benefit. Water was impounded in the 115-mile-long Lake Mead, while massive aqueducts channeled millions of gallons to California both for city dwellers and to irrigate fertile cropland.

(History.com)

The Office of Homeland Security was founded on Oct. 8, 2001, less than one month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush announced the creation of a new office to “develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks.” Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge assumed the role of director and, despite concerns about adding to the federal bureaucracy and dramatically re-organizing the security state, Congress officially voted to make the office a cabinet-level department in November 2002. The Department of Homeland Security eventually absorbed no fewer than 22 agencies into its fold.  It is now one of the largest organs of the federal government, charged with preventing terror attacks, managing border security, immigration and customs, disaster relief and prevention, and other related tasks.

(History.com)

On Oct. 7, 2001, a U.S.-led coalition began attacks on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan with an intense bombing campaign by American and British forces. Logistical support was provided by other nations including France, Germany, Australia and Canada and, later, troops were provided by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance rebels. The invasion of Afghanistan was the opening salvo in the United States’ “war on terrorism” and a response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Dubbed “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the invasion of Afghanistan was intended to target terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida organization and the extreme fundamentalist Taliban government that had ruled most of the country since 1996, and supported and protected al-Qaida. Even as Afghanistan began to take the first steps toward democracy, however, with more than 10,000 U.S. troops in country, al-Qaida and Taliban forces began to regroup in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They continue to engage U.S. and Afghan troops in guerilla-style warfare and have also been responsible for the deaths of elected government officials and aid workers and the kidnapping of foreigners. Hundreds of American and coalition soldiers and thousands of Afghans have been killed and wounded in the fighting.

(History.com)

Sculpting began on the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest, South Dakota, on this day in 1927. It took 12 years for the granite images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt to be completed. The monument was the brainchild of Doane Robinson, a South Dakota historian who was looking for a way to attract more tourists to his state. He hired the sculptor Gutzon Borglum to carve the faces into the mountain, starting with Washington’s. At the time, Borglum, who had white supremacist sympathies, was already in the midst of building a Confederate monument on the face of Stone Mountain in Georgia. But that project had stalled while its funders — the Ku Klux Klan — succumbed to infighting. Workers had to blast Mount Rushmore’s features off the mountain using dynamite. The project cost $1 million and was funded primarily by the federal government. Borglum continued to touch up his work at Mount Rushmore until he died in 1941; he hoped to also carve a series of inscriptions into the mountain, outlining the history of the United States.

(History.com and Smithsonian.com)

On Oct. 3, 1863, while expressing gratitude for a pivotal Union Army victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln announced that the nation will celebrate an official Thanksgiving holiday on November 26, 1863. The speech, written by Secretary of State William Seward, declared that the fourth Thursday of every November thereafter would be considered an official U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving. This announcement harkened back to when George Washington was in his first term as the first president in 1789, and had called for an official celebratory “day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” While Congress overwhelmingly agreed to Washington’s suggestion, the holiday did not yet become an annual event. President Thomas Jefferson felt that public demonstrations of piety to a higher power were inappropriate in a nation based in part on the separation of church and state, and subsequent presidents agreed with him. In fact, no official Thanksgiving proclamation was issued by any president between 1815 and the day Lincoln took the opportunity to thank the Union Army, and God for a shift in the country’s fortunes on this day in 1863. Thanksgiving was temporarily moved to the third Thursday in November by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, in an attempt to boost the economy between the holiday and Christmas. But Congress insisted it be moved back a week and in 1941 Roosevelt agreed.

(History.com)

Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was sworn in on Oct. 2, 1967. As chief counsel for the NAACP in the 1940s and 1950s, Marshall was the architect and executor of the legal strategy that ended the era of official racial segregation. He was born in Baltimore, the great-grandson of a slave, and studied at Howard University under the tutelage of civil liberties lawyer Charles H. Houston, graduating first in his class in 1933. As the NAACP’s chief counsel from 1938 to 1961, he argued more than a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, including 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall to be solicitor general of the United States, where he again argued cases before the Supreme Court but this time on behalf of the U.S. government. For 24 years on the high court until retiring in 1991, Marshall challenged discrimination based on race or sex, opposed the death penalty, and vehemently defended affirmative action.

(History.com)

On Oct. 1, 1890, an act of Congress created Yosemite National Park, home of such natural wonders as Half Dome and the giant sequoia trees. Environmentalist John Muir and his colleagues campaigned for the congressional action, which was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison. Until the 1849 gold rush brought thousands of miners and settlers to the region, Yosemite Valley’s (or Ahwahnee Valley) primary inhabitants were Native Americans such as the Miwuk and Paiute. The influx of tourism, domestic sheep grazing and commercialization of the land motivated Muir to seek its federal protection. In 1864, conservationists convinced President Abraham Lincoln to declare Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias a public trust of California — the first time the U.S. government protected land for public enjoyment; Yellowstone became America’s first national park in 1872. Although many Native Americans were also expelled from their homes in the process. Then on Oct. 1, 1890, Congress set aside over 1,500 square miles of land (about the size of Rhode Island) for what would become Yosemite National Park, America’s third national park. In 1906, the state-controlled Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove came under federal jurisdiction with the rest of the park.

(History.com)

The USS Nautilus, the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine and the first submarine to complete a submerged transit of the North Pole, was commissioned into the U.S. Navy on Sept. 30, 1954. The sub’s initial commanding officer was Eugene “Dennis” Wilkinson, and the vessel shared its name with both Captain Nemo’s fictional submarine in Jules Verne’s classic 1870 science fiction novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” and with the USS Nautilus (SS-168) that served with distinction in World War II. The nuclear-powered Nautilus was authorized in 1951, with laying down for construction in 1952 and launched in January 1954. Final construction was completed in 1955. The nuclear propulsion allowed it to remain submerged far longer than diesel-electric submarines, and travel to previously untapped locations. The submarine was decommissioned in 1980 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982.

(Wikipedia)

Dawn, a now-retired space probe assigned to study two of the protoplanets of Vesta and Ceres in the asteroid belt, launched on Sept. 27, 2007. Dawn is the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies, the first spacecraft to visit either Vesta or Ceres, and the first to visit a dwarf planet, arriving at Ceres in March 2015, a few months before New Horizons flew by Pluto in July 2015. The Dawn mission was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with spacecraft components contributed by partners from Italy, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. It was the first NASA exploratory mission to use ion propulsion, which enabled it to enter and leave the orbit of two celestial bodies. Previous multi-target missions using conventional drives, such as the Voyager program, were restricted to flybys. On Nov. 1, 2018, NASA announced that the Dawn spacecraft had finally exhausted all of its hydrazine fuel, thus ending its mission, and the satellite is currently in an uncontrolled state about Ceres.

(Wikipedia)

On this day 230 years ago, President George Washington appointed the first Cabinet of the United States. The new Senate confirmed Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state, John Jay as chief justice of the U.S., Samuel Osgood to postmaster-general, and Edmund Jennings Randolph as the first attorney general. They were joined by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of War Henry Knox. Vice President John Adams was not included in Washington’s Cabinet because, as president of the Senate, the position was initially regarded as a legislative officer. By the 20th century vice presidents were regularly included as members of the Cabinet and associated primarily with the executive branch. The Cabinet arose from debates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention regarding whether the president would exercise executive authority singly or collaboratively with ministers or a privy council. As a result, Article II of the Constitution vests “all executive power” in the president singly, and authorizes — but does not compel — the president to “require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices.”

(Wikipedia)

The first Congress of the United States approved 12 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and sent them to the states for ratification on this day in 1789. The amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, were designed to protect the basic rights of US citizens, guaranteeing the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and exercise of religion; the right to fair legal procedure and to bear arms; and that powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved for the states and the people. The document was influenced by the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and from Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason in 1776. Mason criticized the final document for lacking constitutional protection of basic political rights. In the ratification process that followed, he and other critics agreed to approve the Constitution in exchange for the assurance that amendments would immediately be adopted. In December 1791, Virginia became the 10th of 14 states to approve 10 of the 12 amendments, thus giving the Bill of Rights the two-thirds majority of state ratification necessary to make it legal. Of the two amendments not ratified, the first concerned the population system of representation, while the second prohibited laws varying the payment of congressional members from taking effect until an election intervened. The first of these two amendments was never ratified, while the second was finally ratified more than 200 years later, in 1992.

(History.com)

On Sept. 24, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson received a special commission’s report on the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Since the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed by a man named Jack Ruby almost immediately after murdering Kennedy, Oswald’s motive for assassinating the president remained unknown. Seven days after the assassination, Johnson appointed the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy to investigate Kennedy’s death. The commission was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren and became known as the Warren Commission. It concluded that Oswald had acted alone and that the Secret Service had made poor preparations for JFK’s visit to Dallas and had failed to sufficiently protect him. The circumstances surrounding Kennedy’s death, however, have since given rise to several conspiracy theories, and the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald was a “lone gunman” failed to satisfy some who witnessed the attack as well as others whose research found conflicting details in the commission’s report. Critics of the Warren Commission’s report believed that additional ballistics experts’ conclusions and a home movie shot at the scene disputed the theory that three bullets fired from Oswald’s gun could have caused Kennedy’s fatal wounds as well as the injuries to Texas Gov.John Connally, who was riding with the president in an open car as it traveled through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. So persistent was the controversy that another congressional investigation was conducted in 1979, which reached the same conclusion as the Warren Commission.

(History.com)

On Sept. 23, 1911, Earle Lewis Ovington piloted the first official airmail flight in the United States. Ovington flew in a Blériot XI and carried a sack of mail from Nassau Boulevard aerodrome in Garden City to Mineola, New York. He circled at 500 feet and tossed the bag over the side of the cockpit and the sack burst on impact, scattering letters and postcards. He delivered 640 letters and 1,280 postcards, including a letter to himself from the U.S. Post Office Department designating him as “Official Air Mail Pilot #1.” The aeronautical engineer, aviator and inventor, had previously served as a lab assistant to Thomas Edison.

(Wikipedia)

Chester Arthur was inaugurated on Sept. 20, 1881, becoming the third person to serve as president in that year. Rutherford B. Hayes began the year in office, finishing his only term and then officially being replaced by James A. Garfield in March 1881. Just four months into his term, on July 2, Garfield was shot by an assassin named Charles Guiteau. Garfield sustained wounds to his back and abdomen and struggled to recover throughout the summer, dying on Sept. 19. The next day, Vice President Chester Arthur was sworn in as president. Strangely, Garfield’s assassin wrote to the new president from jail, taking credit for vaulting Arthur into the White House. Arthur served only one term from 1881 to 1885. This feat of succession was not unprecedented, however — a similar situation occurred in 1841 when Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison and John Tyler all held the office.

(History.com)

On Sept. 19, 1881, President James A. Garfield, who had been in office just under four months, succumbed to wounds inflicted by an assassin 80 days earlier. The assassin was an attorney and political office-seeker named Charles Guiteau, a relative stranger to the president and his administration in an era when federal positions were doled out on a “who you know” basis. When his requests for an appointment were ignored, a furious Guiteau stalked the president, vowing revenge. On the morning of July 2, Garfield headed for the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station on his way to a short vacation. As he walked through the station toward the waiting train, Guiteau stepped behind the president and fired two shots. The first bullet grazed Garfield’s arm; the second lodged below his pancreas. Doctors made several unsuccessful attempts to remove the bullet. Alexander Graham Bell even tried to find the second bullet using an early version of a metal detector, but failed. Garfield’s cause has been disputed, from his physicians’ risky treatments to an already advanced case of heart disease to an aneurism created by internal pressure from the wound. By early September, the president was recuperating at a seaside retreat in New Jersey but then died later that month.

(History.com)

The Fugitive Slave Act, or Fugitive Slave Law, was passed by Congress on Sept. 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850. It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate. By 1843, several hundred slaves a year were successfully escaping to the North, making slavery an unstable institution in the border states. Many Northern states wanted to disregard the earlier Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. In response to the weakening of the original statute, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 penalized officials who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave, and made them liable to a fine. Law-enforcement officials everywhere were required to arrest people suspected of being a runaway slave on as little as a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership. The suspected slave could not ask for a jury trial or testify on his or her own behalf. Slave owners needed only to supply an affidavit to a federal marshal to capture an escaped slave. The law resulted in the kidnapping and conscription of free blacks into slavery, as suspected fugitive slaves had no rights in court and could not defend themselves against accusations. Several Northern businessmen supported the law, due to their business ties with the Southern states, and in the early stages of the Civil War, runaway slaves captured by Union forces were often returned to their masters. But some generals refused, considering them contraband of war and figuring that the loss of workers would also damage the Confederacy. Although the Union policy of confiscation and military emancipation had effectively superseded the operation of the Fugitive Slave Act by 1863, the Fugitive Slave Act was formally repealed in June 1864.

(Wikipedia)

James Vincent Forrestal, the last Cabinet-level secretary of the Navy and first secretary of Defense, was sworn into his latter post on this day in 1947, having been appointed by President Harry Truman. He was previously undersecretary of the Navy in 1940, where he led the national effort for industrial mobilization for the war effort during World War II, and then was named secretary of the Navy in May 1944. When the Defense Department was created in 1947 he was named to lead the organization, although he often clashed with Roosevelt’s successor Truman over national policy. In 1949 it was revealed that Forrestal had met and negotiated for a cabinet position with Truman’s opponent Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 presidential election. He was forced to resign as Defense secretary and later underwent medical care for depression. He died at the age of 57 after falling from a 16th-floor window of the hospital where he was being treated.

(Wikipedia)

The Burke-Wadsworth Act was passed by Congress on Sept. 16, 1940, as the first peacetime draft in the history of the United States. As a result, Selective Service was born and the registration of men between the ages of 21 and 36 began exactly one month later. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who had helped move the Roosevelt administration away from a foreign policy of strict neutrality, began drawing draft numbers out of a glass bowl and those numbers were handed to the president, who read them aloud for public announcement. Some 20 million young men were elligible, 50% of whom were rejected the very first year, either for illiteracy (20%) or health reasons. The draft ages expanded to include 18-20 year olds in 1942. African Americans were passed over for the draft until 1943 because of racist assumptions about their abilities and the viability of a mixed-race military. Later, a “quota” was imposed to limit the numbers of blacks drafted to reflect their numbers in the overall population — roughly 10.6% of the whole. Initially, these troops were restricted to “labor units,” but this too ended as the war progressed, when they were finally put in combat.

(History.com)

On this day in 1948, Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican from Maine, making her the first woman to be elected to both chambers of Congress. She had previously served in the House, having first won a special election to fill her husband’s vacant seat after he died in office and then winning a second, full term. There she was active in the Naval Affairs and Armed Services committees, and championed the Women’s Armed Forces Integration Act through both chambers. In the Senate, she garnered seats on the Appropriations, Armed Services and Aeronautical and Space Sciences committees. She also was considered more of a moderate than hard-line Republican, and made a name for herself when on June 1, 1950, she took the Senate Floor to denounce the controversial investigatory tactics of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, leading to a reduction of some of her clout in party and committee operations. She later ran for president on the Republican ticket in 1964 but lost the nomination by a wide margin to Barry Goldwater.

(House of Representatives)

On Sept. 12, 2006, four gunmen attacked the American Embassy in Damascus, Syria, storming the compound with grenades and automatic weapons before being repelled by Syrian security forces. Three of the gunmen were killed and a fourth was wounded, while one Syrian security official was killed and about a dozen people were wounded, including three Syrian security officials and a Syrian guard employed by the embassy. No American personnel were injured and the attackers failed to detonate a vehicle packed with explosives. The New York Times reported the attack was at the time a rare instance of terrorist violence in the tightly controlled Syrian capital, and was the first time the American Embassy had been a target. The attack also came after the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and recently made threats by Al Qaeda. US support for Israel during the war in Lebanon had generated anger in the region, the Time reported.

(The New York Times)

On September 11, 2001, 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States. Two of the planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people were killed during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which triggered major U.S. initiatives to combat terrorism and defined the presidency of George W. Bush.

President Andrew Jackson announced that the government would no longer use the Second Bank of the United States, the country’s national bank, on this day in 1833. He then used his executive power to remove all federal funds from the bank, as part of what is referred to as the “Bank War.” A national bank had first been created by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton in 1791 to serve as a central repository for federal funds. Traditionally, the bank had been run by a board of directors with ties to industry and manufacturing, and therefore was biased toward the urban and industrial northern states. Jackson resented the bank’s lack of funding for expansion into the unsettled Western territories and objected to the bank’s unusual political and economic power, as well as a lack of congressional oversight over its business dealings. Jackson called for an investigation into the bank’s policies and political agenda and indicated he planned to challenge its constitutionality. Congress rejected his argument and Jackson vetoed Congress’ attempt at a new charter for the bank in 1832. The next year the president removed all federal funds from the Second Bank of the U.S., redistributing them to various state banks known as “pet banks.” Its charter officially expired in 1836, meanwhile Congress censured the president in 1834 for what they considered an abuse of power.

(History.com)

On Sept. 9, 1776, the Continental Congress formally declared the name of the new nation to be the “United States” of America, replacing the term “United Colonies,” which had been in general use. The delegates wrote, “That in all continental commissions, and other instruments, where, heretofore, the words ‘United Colonies’ have been used, the stile be altered for the future to the “United States.” A resolution by Richard Henry Lee, which had been presented to Congress on June 7 and approved on July 2, 1776, issued the resolve, “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States….” As a result, John Adams thought July 2 would be celebrated as “the most memorable epoch in the history of America.” Instead, the day has been largely forgotten in favor of July 4, when Jefferson’s edited Declaration of Independence was adopted. That document also states, “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be free and independent states.”

(History.com)

On this day in 1901, President William McKinley was shaking hands at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, New York, when a 28-year-old anarchist named Leon Czolgosz approached him and fired two shots into his chest. The president rose slightly on his toes before collapsing forward, saying, “be careful how you tell my wife.” Czolgosz was wrestled to the ground by the president’s bodyguards but McKinley, still conscious, told the guards not to hurt his assailant. Other presidential attendants rushed McKinley to the hospital where they found two bullet wounds. One bullet had superficially punctured his sternum and the other had dangerously entered his abdomen. He was rushed into surgery and seemed to be on the mend by Sept. 12, but he died two days later from gangrene that had gone undetected in the internal wound. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was immediately sworn in as president.

(History.com)

In response to the British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convened at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia on Sept. 5, 1774. Fifty-six delegates from all the colonies except Georgia drafted a declaration of rights and grievances and elected Peyton Randolph of Virginia as the first president of Congress. Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay were among the delegates. The first major American opposition to British policy came in 1765 when colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the law. After militant Patriots in Massachusetts organized the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Parliament enacted the Coercive Acts, or the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. These closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. In response, colonists called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.

(History.com)

The USS Shenandoah, the first of four Navy rigid airships, officially took flight on this day in 1923. It was constructed during 1922–1923 at Lakehurst Naval Air Station and was destroyed on its 57th flight in a squall line over Ohio two years later. The airship was intended for fleet reconnaissance work of the type carried out by German naval airships in World War I. USS Shenandoah was 680 feet long, weighed 36 tons, encompassed 2,100,000 cubic feet, had a range of 5,000 miles and could reach speeds of 70 mph. The design was based on the Zeppelin bomber L-49, but Shenandoah was the first rigid airship to use helium instead of hydrogen, thus giving it an edge in safety. Helium was relatively scarce at the time, and the airship used much of the world’s reserves just to fill it. It was named by Mrs. Edwin Denby, wife of the secretary of the Navy, after her home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and on Oct. 27, 1923, it marked Navy Day with a flight down the Valley, returning to Lakehurst by way of Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.

(Wikipedia)

On Sept. 3, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson began a tour across the U.S. to promote American membership in the League of Nations, an international body that he hoped would help to solve international conflicts and prevent another bloody conflict like World War I. The war illustrated to Wilson the unavoidable relationship between international stability and American national security. In January 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I, Wilson urged leaders from France, Great Britain and Italy to come together with leaders of other nations to draft a Covenant of League of Nations. The plan was met with stiff opposition from the Republican majority in Congress, which was wary of the international covenant’s vague language and legal loopholes regarding America’s sovereignty. As such the body refused to adopt the agreement and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson embarked on his tour across the country to sell the idea directly to the American people, arguing that isolationism did not work. The tour encompassed 8,000 miles in 22 days, during which the president experienced constant headaches, collapsed from exhaustion and suffered a near-fatal stroke. After World War II the League was replaced by an even larger institution which America did join — the United Nations.

(History.com)

Air Force Lt. Col. Guion Bluford II became the first African American to travel into space when the shuttle Challenger lifted off on its third mission on this day in 1983 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Challenger spent six days in space, during which time Bluford and his four fellow crew members launched a communications satellite for the government of India, made contact with an errant communications satellite, conducted scientific experiments, and tested the shuttle’s robotic arm. On Sept. 5 the shuttle landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California, bringing an end to the most flawless shuttle mission to that date. Bluford was born in Philadelphia in 1942 and from an early age was fascinated with flight. Wanting to design and build airplanes, he graduated from Penn State university in 1964 and entered the Air Force to learn how to fly them. He flew 144 combat missions in Vietnam, then became a flight instructor and was accepted into the U.S. astronaut program in 1979. After the 1983 shuttle mission he flew three more, logging a total of 700 hours in orbit. After leaving NASA he became vice president and general manager of an engineering company in Ohio.

(History.com)

Early Air Force Academy leadership followed the models of West Point and the Naval Academy in designing an appropriate curriculum, faculty, and campus. No permanent home had been completed when the first class of 306 cadets, the Class of 1959, were sworn in at a temporary site at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver on July 11, 1955. While at Lowry, they were housed in renovated World War II barracks. There were no upper class cadets to train the new cadets, so the Air Force appointed a cadre of “air training officers” (ATOs) to conduct training. The ATOs were junior officers, many of whom were graduates of West Point, Annapolis, VMI, and The Citadel. For the cadet parade uniform, the Air Force hired Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille to design the style which is still worn today. The CLass of 1959 also adopted the Cadet Honor Code and chose the falcon as the Academy’s mascot. On Aug. 29, 1958, 1,145 cadets moved to the Academy’s present site near Colorado Springs and less than a year later the institution was accredited.

(Wikipedia)

On this day in 1957, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina began what is still the longest Senate filibuster in history by a single senator, in an attempt to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Thurmond campaigned on his aversion to the bill and remained an opponent of civil rights legislation and desegregation efforts. He was the first person even elected to the Senate by write-in, and holds the title of oldest-serving senator in history due to reaching the age of 100 while in office. His filibuster lasted 24 hours and 18 minutes though was unsuccessful. The bill passed Congress the following day, and exactly six years later to the day of the filibuster, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic “I Have A Dream” speech to the March on Washington.

(Wikipedia)

Mariner 2, an American space probe to Venus, was the first robotic space probe to conduct a successful planetary encounter. The first successful spacecraft in the NASA Mariner program, it was a simplified version of the Block I spacecraft of the Ranger program and an exact copy of Mariner 1. The Mariner probe consisted of a 39.4-inch diameter hexagonal bus with solar panels, instrument booms, and antennas. The scientific instruments on board the Mariner spacecraft were: two radiometers, a micrometeorite sensor, a solar plasma sensor, a charged particle sensor, and a magnetometer. These instruments were designed to measure the temperature distribution on the surface of Venus and to make basic measurements of Venus’ atmosphere. Mariner 2 was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Aug. 27, 1962, and passed as close as 21,607 miles to Venus on Dec. 14, 1962.

(Wikipedia)

The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution by proclamation of Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby on Aug. 26, 1920. The amendment was the culmination of more than 70 years of struggle by woman suffragists and read simply: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” and “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” America’s woman suffrage movement was founded in the mid-19th century by women who had become politically active through their work in the abolitionist and temperance movements. In July 1848, 200 woman suffragists met in Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss women’s rights. After approving measures asserting the right of women to educational and employment opportunities, they passed a resolution that declared “it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” The first national woman’s rights convention was held in 1850 and then repeated annually, providing an important focus for the growing woman suffrage movement. When the 15th Amendment was adopted, granting African American men the right to vote, Congress declined to expand enfranchisement into the sphere of gender. In 1890 Wyoming became the first state to grant women the right to vote.

(History.com)

On this day in 1861, Allan Pinkerton, head of the new secret service agency, arrested Washington, D.C. socialite and Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow under house arrest. She was a wealthy and well-connected widow from Maryland who openly sympathized with the Southern cause and was close with Massachusetts Sen. Henry Wilson. She formed a substantial spy network which she managed to run even while under police supervision, and her intel led to the Confederate victory over Union forces at the First Battle of Bull Run in Virginia. Eventually she and her daughter were transferred to the Old Capitol Prison, later to be released and exiled to the South. Greenhow traveled to England and France to drum up support for the Confederate army and on her return voyage a Yankee war vessel ran her ship aground in North Carolina. Weighted down by a substantial amount of gold, Greenhow’s lifeboat overturned and she drowned.

(History.com)

In the second day of a standoff at Randy Weaver’s remote northern Idaho cabin atop Ruby Ridge, FBI sharpshooter Lon Horiuchi wounded Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris, and then killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki. An alleged white supremacist, Randy Weaver had been targeted by the federal government for selling two illegal sawed-off shotguns to an undercover informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives at a meeting of Aryan Nations. He was offered the chance to become an informant for the FBI in exchange for having the charges dropped, but refused. He then failed to appear for his trial date after pretrial services incorrectly sent his notice with the wrong date. On Aug. 21, 1992, after a period of surveillance, U.S. marshals came upon Harris, Weaver, Weaver’s 14-year-old son Sammy and the family dog on a road near the Weaver property to arrest Weaver. A marshal shot and killed the dog, prompting Sammy to fire at the marshal. In the ensuing gun battle, Sammy and U.S. Marshal Michael Degan were shot and killed. A tense standoff ensued, and the next day the FBI joined the marshals besieging Ruby Ridge. The controversial standoff spawned a nationwide debate on the use of force by federal law enforcement agencies, and a U.S. Senate panel accused the federal agencies involved of “substantial failures” in their handling of the Ruby Ridge operation. It also inspired anti-government extremists including Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

(History.com)

Hawaii became the 50th US state on Aug. 21, 1959, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a proclamation of its admittance. He also also issued an order for an American flag featuring 50 stars arranged in staggered rows, which became official July 4, 1960. The first known settlers of the Hawaiian Islands were Polynesian voyagers who arrived sometime in the eighth century. In the early 18th century, American traders came to Hawaii to exploit the islands’ sandalwood, followed by the sugar industry in the 1830s. American and European missionaries and planters later altered Hawaiian political, cultural, economic, and religious life, as well as introduced diseases that wiped out much of the native population. In 1840, a constitutional monarchy was established, stripping the Hawaiian monarch of much of his authority. In 1893, a group of American expatriates and sugar planters supported by a division of Marines deposed Queen Liliuokalani, the last reigning monarch of Hawaii. One year later, the Republic of Hawaii was established as a U.S. protectorate with Hawaiian-born Sanford B. Dole as president. Many in Congress opposed the formal annexation of Hawaii, and it was not until 1898, following the use of the naval base at Pearl Harbor during the Spanish-American War, that Hawaii’s strategic importance became evident and formal annexation was approved. Two years later, Hawaii was organized into a formal US territory.

(History.com)

The first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars, Viking 1 was part of a two-part mission to investigate the Red Planet and search for signs of life. It launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Aug. 20, 1975, and landed July 20, 1976. The spacecraft consisted of both an orbiter and a lander designed to take high-resolution images, and study the Martian surface and atmosphere. Operating on Mars’ Chryse Planitia for more than six years, Viking 1 performed the first Martian soil sample using its robotic arm and a special biological laboratory. While it found no traces of life, Viking 1 did help better characterize Mars as a cold planet with volcanic soil, a thin, dry carbon dioxide atmosphere and striking evidence for ancient river beds and vast flooding.

(NASA)

U.S. Ambassador Rodger Davies and Antoinette Varnavas, an embassy secretary and a Greek Cypriot national, were killed during an anti-American protest outside the embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus, on Aug. 19, 1974. Davies had been serving in Cyprus since May 1973 and it was alleged he and Varnavas were killed by sniper fire from a nearby building by Greek Cypriot gunmen of the nationalist paramilitary organization EOKA-B, which aimed to unite Cyprus with Greece. Afterwards, the U.S. government sent his replacement William R. Crawford, then-ambassador to Yemen, to Cyprus to signal it did not blame Greek Cypriot authorities for the assassination. The Turkish invasion of the island had launched July 20 and ended one day before Davies’ death. It was preceded by a military coup d’état by the Greek Army in Cyprus, the Cypriot National Guard and the Greek military junta of 1967–1974, which ousted President Makarios III and replaced him with pro-Enosis (Greek irridentist) nationalist Nikos Sampson. The coup was viewed as illegal by the United Nations and violated human rights laws.

(Wikipedia.org)

 

The Migratory Bird Treaty or Convention, an environmental treaty between Canada and the U.S., was originally signed on this day in 1916. It stated, “Whereas, many species of birds in the course of their annual migrations traverse certain parts of the Dominion of Canada and the United States; and whereas, many of these species are of great value as a source of food or in destroying insects which are injurious to forests and forage plants on the public domain, as well as to agricultural crops, in both Canada and the United States, but are nevertheless in danger of extermination through lack of adequate protection during the nesting season or while on their way to and from their breeding grounds; His Majesty the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British dominions beyond the seas, Emperor of India, and the United States of America, being desirous of saving from indiscriminate slaughter and of insuring the preservation of such migratory birds as are either useful to man or are harmless, have resolved to adopt some uniform system of protection which shall effectively accomplish such objects …” This treaty led to important environmental legislation being passed in each of the two countries in order to implement the terms of the treaty, and the U.S. subsequently entered into similar agreements with Canada, Mexico, Japan and Russia to protect migratory birds.

(Wikipedia)

On Aug. 14, 1945, it was announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, effectively ending World War II. Since then, both Aug. 14 and 15 have been known as “Victory-over-Japan Day,” or simply “V-J Day.” The Potsdam Declaration, issued by Allied leaders on July 26, 1945, called on Japan to surrender and if so, promised a peaceful government according to “the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.” The Japanese government in Tokyo refused to surrender, and on Aug. 6 the American B-29 plane Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, followed by a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later. The following day, the Japanese government issued a statement accepting the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. On Sept. 2, Allied supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur, along with the Japanese foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, and the chief of staff of the Japanese army, Yoshijiro Umezu, signed the official surrender aboard the USS Missouri, effectively ending World War II.

(History.com)

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act on Aug. 14, 1935. The law guaranteed an income for the unemployed and retirees. Roosevelt had taken the helm of the country in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression. The Social Security Act was in keeping with his other “New Deal” programs including the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, which both attempted to hoist America out of the Great Depression by putting Americans back to work. In his public statement that day, FDR expressed concern for “young people [who] have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age” as well as those who had employment but no job security. Although he acknowledged that “we can never insure 100% of the population against 100% of the hazards and vicissitudes of life,” he hoped the act would prevent senior citizens from ending up impoverished. Although it was initially created to combat unemployment, Social Security now functions primarily as a safety net for retirees and the disabled, and provides death benefits to taxpayer dependents. The Social Security system has remained relatively unchanged since 1935.

(History.com)

Opha May Johnson was the first woman known to have enlisted in the US Marine Corps. She joined the Corps Reserve on this day in 1918, the first of 300 women in line to do so that day. Her early duties included clerking at Headquarters Marine Corps, managing the records of other female reservists who joined after her. She was promoted to sergeant in September 1918, and was the highest-ranking woman in the Marine Corps during her time in service. Prior to joining the military, Johnson graduated from the shorthand and typewriting department of Wood’s Commercial College in Washington, D.C., in 1895, and worked for the Interstate Commerce Commission. She was a charter member of the American Legion’s first post of women’s Marine Corps reservists. After World War I all military services began the steadily disenrolling women from active service, and Johnson became a clerk in the War Department, still working for the Marine Corps as a civil servant until retiring in 1943.

(Wikipedia.org)

President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill meet on board a ship at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, Canada, on Aug. 12, 1941. Among the items on their agenda was aid to the Soviet Union “on a gigantic scale” against its German invaders. A statement was also drafted that said that any further aggression would “produce a situation in which the United States government would be compelled to take counter-measures,” even if it meant “war between the United States and Japan.” The president and the prime minister also made public a document in which their nations declared their intention “to ensure life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom, and to preserve the rights of man and justice.” They also promised to strive for a postwar world free of “aggrandizement, territorial or other,” addressing those nations currently under German, Italian, or Japanese rule, offering hope that the integrity of their sovereign borders would be restored to them. It was called the Atlantic Charter and, when ratified by 26 nations in January 1942, comprised the founding principles of the United Nations.

(History.com)

The U.S. Forest Service’s iconic mascot, Smokey Bear — technically the “the” was added when songwriters wrote a jingle for him — was created 75 years ago today for joint effort between the Agriculture Department of the Ad Council to promote forest fire prevention. Artist Albert Staehle painted the first poster of Smokey Bear, which depicted a bear pouring a bucket of water on a campfire and saying “Care will prevent 9 out of 10 fires.” Smokey Bear soon became very popular as his image appeared on a variety of forest fire prevention materials. In 1947, his slogan became the familiar “Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires!” Then in the spring of 1950, in the Capitan Mountains of New Mexico, a young bear cub found himself caught in a burning forest. He took refuge in a tree, and while managing to stay alive was left badly burned. The firefighters who retrieved him were so moved by his bravery, they named him Smokey. News about this real bear named Smokey spread across the Nation, and he was soon given a new home at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. The living symbol of Smokey Bear, he played an important role in spreading messages of wildfire prevention and forest conservation until his death in 1976. He was buried at State Historical Park in his original home of Capitan.

(U.S. Forest Service)

In the aftermath of his defeat at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee sent a letter of resignation as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Lee’s intent had been to drive the Union army from Virginia, which he did, and the Army of the Potomac suffered over 28,000 casualties, thus temporarily disabling the Union army’s offensive capabilities. But the Army of Northern Virginia absorbed 23,000 casualties, nearly one-third of its total. As the weeks rolled by and the Union army reentered Virginia, it became clear that the Confederacy had suffered a serious defeat at Gettysburg. As the press began to openly speculate about Lee’s leadership, the great general reflected on the campaign at his headquarters in Orange Courthouse, Virginia. Lee not only seriously questioned his ability to lead his army, he was also experiencing significant physical fatigue. Regardless, Davis refused the request.

(History.com)

On Aug. 7, 1990, President George H.W. Bush ordered the organization of Operation Desert Shield in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2. The order prepared American troops to become part of an international coalition in the war against Iraq that would be launched as Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. To support Operation Desert Shield, Bush authorized a dramatic increase in U.S. troops and resources in the Persian Gulf. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and hard-line Iraqi nationalists had always believed Kuwait should be part of Iraq, but acquiring control of Kuwait’s oil fields was Hussein’s primary interest. It also represented a strategic military objective should Iraq be forced into a war with its western-friendly Arab neighbors. When Iraqi ground forces entered Kuwait, Bush vowed to help Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. On Nov. 29 the United Nations Security Council authorized the use of “all means necessary” to remove Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, giving Iraq the deadline of midnight on Jan. 16, 1991, to leave or risk forcible removal. After negotiations between U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Iraq’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, failed, Congress authorized Bush to use American troops in the coming conflict.

(History.com)

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. became the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 were injured. At least another 60,000 died by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout. America had been working on developing an atomic weapon since 1940, after having been warned by Albert Einstein that Nazi Germany was already conducting research into nuclear weapons. By the time the U.S. conducted the first successful test, in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, Germany had already been defeated. The war against Japan in the Pacific raged on, however, and President Harry S. Truman was warned by some of his advisers that any attempt to invade Japan would result in horrific American casualties. He ordered that the new weapon be used to bring the war to a speedy end, and so on Aug. 6, 1945, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped a five-ton bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, killing nearly 40,000 more people, and a few days later, Japan announced its surrender.

(History.com)

On this day in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln imposed the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act. The country was strapped for cash with which to pursue the Civil War, so Lincoln and Congress agreed to impose a 3% tax on annual incomes over $800. According to documents housed and interpreted by the Library of Congress, Lincoln was particularly concerned about maintaining federal authority over collecting revenue from ports along the southeastern seaboard, which he worried, might fall under the control of the Confederacy. The Revenue Act’s language was broadly written to define income as gain “derived from any kind of property, or from any professional trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere or from any source whatever.” According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the comparable minimum taxable income in 2003, after adjustments for inflation, would have been approximately $16,000. Congress repealed Lincoln’s tax law in 1871, but in 1913 ratified the 16th Amendment, which set in place the federal income-tax system used today.

(History.com)

Harding was elected president in 1920 as a “compromise” candidate for the Republican party. He promised a “return to normalcy,” and signed bills that reduced taxes for both individuals and corporations, set high protective tariffs, created a federal budget system and limited immigration, particularly from southern and eastern Europe. He also hosted a disarmament conference. But his term also included the Teapot Dome scandal in which several prominent officials took bribes, including his interior secretary and his Veterans Bureau director. In early 1923, before the first scandals began emerging, Harding came down with the flu and had trouble sleeping. While exploring Yellowstone and Zion national parks as well as stopping in several cities on an official tour, some observers claimed that Harding looked tired. But the president’s personal physician, Dr. Charles E. Sawyer, who also practiced homeopathy, dismissed the claims. He participated in numerous recreational activities throughout the trip but during a speech at the University of Washington on July 27, Harding dropped his manuscript and grasped the podium for balance. He went to bed early complaining of upper abdominal pain. Only July 30 he had a fever of 102 degrees and was diagnosed with pneumonia. On Aug. 1, his temperature was back to normal, his lungs were clearing up and he was capable of sitting up in bed, reading and eating solid food. But around 7:30 p.m. a day later, Harding abruptly died in bed. He was 57 years old. Sawyer attributed it to a cerebral hemorrhage. but today, nearly all experts place the blame on congestive heart failure.

(History.com)

On Aug. 1, 1907, the U.S. Army Signal Corps established a small Aeronautical Division to take “charge of all matters pertaining to military ballooning, air machines and all kindred subjects.” The Signal Corps began testing its first airplane at Fort Myer, Virginia, on Aug. 20, 1908. After more testing with an improved Wright Flyer, the Army formally accepted this airplane, identified as “Airplane No. 1,” on Aug. 2, 1909. In early 1913, the Army ordered its aviators who were training in Augusta, Georgia, and Palm Beach, Florida, to Texas to take part in 2d Division maneuvers. In Galveston on March 3, the Chief Signal Officer designated the assembled men and equipment the “1st Provisional Aero Squadron,” with Capt Charles DeF. Chandler as squadron commander. The 1st Provisional Aero Squadron began flying activities a few days later. On Dec. 4, general orders redesignated the unit as the 1st Aero Squadron, effective Dec. 8, 1913. This first military unit of the U.S. Army devoted exclusively to aviation, today designated the 1st Reconnaissance Squadron, has remained continuously active since its creation.

(Military.com)

On July 31, 1790, Philadelphia inventor Samuel Hopkins was granted the first U.S. patent, under the new patent statute just signed into law by President George Washington on April 10 of that yeah. Hopkins had petitioned for a patent on an improvement “in the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.” The statute did not create a patent office but rather a committee of the secretary of State, secretary of War (later replaced by the secretaries of the Army and Air Force) and the attorney general were authorized to make a decision on the merit of a properly documented petition. Potash, especially potassium carbonate, has been used in bleaching textiles, making glass, and making soap, since about AD 500. It was one of the most important industrial chemicals and was refined from the ashes of broadleaved trees and produced primarily in the forested areas of Europe, Russia, and North America.

(Wikipedia)

In Jamestown, Virginia, the first representative legislative assembly in the New World — the House of Burgesses — convened in the choir of the town’s church. Earlier that year, the London Company, which had established the Jamestown settlement 12 years before, directed Virginia Gov. Sir George Yeardley to summon a “General Assembly” elected by the settlers, with every free adult male voting. Twenty-two representatives from the 11 Jamestown boroughs were chosen, and Master John Pory was appointed the assembly’s speaker. On July 30, 1619, the House of Burgesses, an English word for “citizens,” convened for the first time. Its first laws required tobacco to be sold for at least three shillings per pound, included prohibitions against gambling, drunkenness, and idleness, and made Sabbath observance mandatory. Yeardley became popular among the colonists and he served two terms as Virginia governor.

(History.com)

On July 29, 1958, the U.S. Congress passed legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America’s activities in space. NASA now sponsors space expeditions, both human and mechanical, that have yielded vital information about the solar system and universe. It’s also launched numerous earth-orbiting satellites that have been instrumental in everything from weather forecasting to navigation to global communications.

(History.com)

On this day in 1775, the U.S. postal system was established by the Second Continental Congress, with Benjamin Franklin as its first postmaster general. During early colonial times in the 1600s, mail deliveries from across the Atlantic were sporadic and could take many months to arrive. There were no post offices in the colonies, so mail was typically left at inns and taverns. In 1753 Franklin, who had been postmaster of Philadelphia, became one of two joint postmasters general for the colonies. He made numerous improvements to the mail system, including setting up new, more efficient colonial routes and cutting delivery time in half between Philadelphia and New York by having the weekly mail wagon travel both day and night via relay teams. Franklin also debuted the first rate chart, which standardized delivery costs based on distance and weight. By the time Franklin left the job of postmaster general in 1776, the mail system had routes from Florida to Maine and regular service between the colonies and Britain. President George Washington appointed Samuel Osgood as the first postmaster general of the American nation under the new U.S. constitution in 1789, at which time there were approximately 75 post offices in the country.

(History.com)

During the Spanish-American War, U.S. forces launched their invasion of Puerto Rico, the 108-mile-long, 40-mile-wide island that was one of Spain’s two principal possessions in the Caribbean, on this day in 1898. U.S. troops under Gen. Nelson A. Miles were able to secure the island by mid-August and after the signing of an armistice with Spain, raised the American flag over the island, formalizing US authority over Puerto Rico’s 1 million inhabitants. In December, the Treaty of Paris officially approving the cession of Puerto Rico to the United States. In the first three decades of its rule, the U.S. government made efforts to Americanize its new possession, including granting full U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917. But during the 1930s, a nationalist movement led by the Popular Democratic Party won wide support across the island, and further U.S. assimilation was successfully opposed. Beginning in 1948, Puerto Ricans could elect their own governor, and in 1952 the U.S. Congress approved a new Puerto Rican constitution that made the island an autonomous U.S. commonwealth, with its citizens retaining American citizenship. The constitution was formally adopted by Puerto Rico on July 25, 1952, the 54th anniversary of the U.S. invasion.

(History.com)

Apollo 11, the U.S. spacecraft that had taken the first astronauts to the surface of the moon, safely returned to Earth on July 24, 1969. It launched eight days earlier from Kennedy Space Center in Florida with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr., and Michael Collins aboard. After traveling 240,000 miles in 76 hours, the spacecraft entered into a lunar orbit on July 19. The next day, at 1:46 p.m., the lunar module Eagle touched down on the southwestern edge of the moon in the Sea of Tranquility, prompting Armstrong to radio to Mission Control in Houston, “The Eagle has landed.” On July 22 Apollo 11 began its journey home, safely splashing down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:51 p.m. on July 24. There would be five more successful lunar landing missions, until Apollo 17 left the lunar surface on December 14, 1972.

(History.com)

July 23, 1999, marked the 95th launch of the Space Shuttle, the 26th launch of Columbia, and the first female shuttle commander: Eileen Collins. The Columbia shuttle’s primary payload was the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and its last mission until March 2002. The payload was also the heaviest ever carried by the Space Shuttle system, weighing over 25 tons. Collins is a former military instructor and test pilot whose first flight aboard the Space Shuttle was in 1995 for STS-63, which involved a rendezvous between Discovery and the Russian space station Mir. Columbia returned to Earth on July 28, 1999.

(Wikipedia)

The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, also known as the “court-packing plan,” was a legislative initiative proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to add more justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. The amount of eight associate justices and one chief justice was established with the Judiciary Act of 1869. FDR desired favorable rulings regarding New Deal legislation that the court had ruled unconstitutional, and the bill would have granted the president power to appoint an additional justice to the Court — up to a maximum of six — for every member of the court over the age of 70 years and 6 months. During Roosevelt’s first term the Supreme Court struck down several New Deal measures as being unconstitutional. Roosevelt sought to reverse this by changing the makeup of the court through the appointment of new additional justices who he hoped would rule his legislative initiatives did not exceed the constitutional authority of the government. After the Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson died suddenly, the vice president told FDR he would not secure the necessary votes to push the bill through. Nearly a week later, the Senate voted 70–20 to send the judicial-reform measure back to committee, where the controversial language was stripped by explicit instruction from the Senate floor. By July 29, 1937, the Senate Judiciary Committee produced a revised Judicial Procedures Reform Act that revised the lower courts but did not provide more federal judges or justices.

(Wikipedia)

In January 1941 the War Department formed the all-black 99th Pursuit Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Corps (later the U.S. Army Air Forces), to be trained using single-engine planes at the segregated Tuskegee Army Air Field at Tuskegee, Alabama. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the black press, and others had been lobbying hard for the government to allow African Americans to become military pilots. But neither the NAACP nor the most-involved black newspapers approved the solution of creating separate black units; they believed that approach simply perpetuated segregation and discrimination. Nevertheless, largely at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a separate unit was created. The Tuskegee base opened on July 19 of that year and the first class graduated the following March. Lieut. Col. Benjamin Oliver Davis, Jr., became the squadron’s commander. Altogether, 992 pilots graduated from the Tuskegee Air Field courses, and they flew 1,578 missions and 15,533 sorties, destroyed 261 enemy aircraft, and won more than 850 medals.

(Encyclopedia Britannica)

On this day in 1947, President Harry Truman (pictured left next to then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt), signed the Presidential Succession Act, revising an older version passed in 1792 during George Washington’s first term. The original succession act designated the Senate president pro tempore as the first in line to succeed the president should he and the vice president die unexpectedly while in office. If he for some reason could not take over the duties, the speaker of the house was placed next in the line of succession. In 1886, during Grover Cleveland’s administration, Congress removed both the Senate president and the speaker of the house from the line of succession. From that time until 1947, two cabinet officials — their order in line depended on the order in which the agencies were created — became the next in line to succeed a president should the vice president also become incapacitated or die. The decision was controversial. Many members of Congress felt that those in a position to succeed the president should be elected officials and not, as cabinet members were, political appointees, thereby giving both Republican and Democratic parties a chance at controlling the White House. In 1945, then-Vice President Truman assumed the presidency after Roosevelt died of a stroke during his fourth term. As president, Truman advanced the view that the speaker of the house, as an elected official, should be next in line to be president after the vice president.

(History.com)

As part of a mission to develop space rescue capability, the U.S. spacecraft Apollo Command/Service Module and the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 19 docked in space on July 17, 1975. As the hatch was opened between the two vessels, commanders Thomas P. Safford and Aleksei Leonov shook hands and exchanged gifts in celebration as a symbol of the policy of détente that the two Cold War superpowers were pursuing at the time. It also marked the end of the Space Race that began in 1957 with the Sputnik launch. During the 44-hour Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, the astronauts and cosmonauts conducted experiments, shared meals, and held a joint news conference. At the time it was thought that space would become either more international or competitive and as a result, it became both. The mission became symbolic of each country’s goals of scientific cooperation, while their individual news reports downplayed the technical prowess of the other. Stafford and Leonov, meanwhile, remained friends and Leonov is the godfather of Stafford’s younger children.

(Wikipedia)

On July 16, 1790, Congress declared that a swampy, humid, muddy and mosquito-infested site on the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia would be the nation’s permanent capital. “Washington,” in the newly designated federal “District of Columbia,” was named after the leader of the American Revolution and the country’s first president: George Washington, who saw the area’s potential economic and accessibility benefits due to the proximity of navigable rivers. He had been in office just over one year by this point, and asked French architect and city planner Pierre L’Enfant to design the capital. In 1793, the first cornerstones of the president’s mansion, which was eventually renamed the “White House,” were laid.

(History.com)

On this day in 1979, President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation via live television to discuss the nation’s energy crisis and accompanying recession. Carter prefaced his talk about energy policy with an explanation of why he believed the American economy remained in crisis. He recounted a meeting he had hosted at the presidential retreat in Camp David, where attendees said that Americans were also suffering from a deeper moral and spiritual crisis. Carter concluded this was at the core of America’s inability to hoist itself out of its economic troubles. He also admitted his failure to provide strong leadership on many issues, particularly energy and oil consumption. In 1979, America could still feel the effects of OPEC’s 1973 cuts in oil production, while Europe and Japan were out-producing the U.S. in energy-efficient automobiles. Carter then described his energy policy plans, which included the implementation of mandatory conservation efforts, deep cuts in the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, a “massive commitment of funds and resources” to develop alternative fuel sources and the creation of a “solar bank” that he said would eventually supply 20 percent of the nation’s energy.

(History.com)

Although experimental military helicopters had been tested since 1947, it was not until 10 years later that a president considered using the new machine for short, official trips to and from the White House. Eisenhower suggested the idea to the Secret Service, which approved of the new mode of transportation, seeing it as safer and more efficient than the traditional limousine motorcade.

(History.com)

 

Normalization with America’s old enemy began in early 1994, when President Clinton announced the lifting of the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam. Despite the lifting of the embargo, high tariffs remained on Vietnamese exports pending the country’s qualification as a “most favored nation,” a U.S. trade status designation that Vietnam might earn after broadening its program of free-market reforms. In July 1995, Clinton established diplomatic relations. In making the decision, Clinton was advised by Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, an ex-navy pilot who had spent five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Brushing aside criticism of Clinton’s decision by some Republicans, McCain asserted that it was time for America to normalize relations with Vietnam.

(History.com)

The Second Bank of the United States, located in Philadelphia, was the second federally authorized national bank in the United States during its 20-year charter from February 1816 to January 1836. A private corporation with public duties, the bank handled all fiscal transactions for the U.S. Government, and was accountable to Congress and the U.S. Treasury. Twenty percent of its capital was owned by the federal government, the bank’s single largest stockholder. On July 10, 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill that would recharter the bank.

(Wikipedia)

On July 9, 1947, General Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Florence Blanchfield to be a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army in a ceremony held at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, making her the first woman in U.S. history to hold permanent military rank. A member of the Army Nurse Corps since 1917, Blanchfield secured her commission following the passage of the Army-Navy Nurse Act of 1947 by Congress. Blanchfield had served as superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps during World War II and was instrumental in securing passage of the Army-Navy Nurse Act, which was advocated by Rep. Frances Payne Bolton. Blanchfield’s mother and two sisters were also nurses, while her maternal grandfather and one of her uncles were physicians. In 1951, Blanchfield received the Florence Nightingale Award from the International Red Cross. In 1978, a US Army hospital in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was named in her honor. She is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

(History.com)

On July 8, 2011, Atlantis was launched on it’s 33rd and final mission. It was also the last space shuttle mission in general. By the end of its final mission, the spacecraft had orbited Earth a total of 4,848 times, traveling nearly 126,000,000 miles or more than 525 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

(Wikipedia/NASA)

Originally formed to combat counterfeiting, the U.S. Secret Service was created as a division of the Treasury Department on July 5, 1865, and its first chief was William Wood. However, it was dependent upon annual appropriations until 1951. Two years after its formation the Service’s responsibilities expanded to include “detecting person perpetuating frauds against the government.” It began part-time informal protection of President Grover Cleveland in 1894 and in 1901, after President William McKinley was assassinated Congress asked the agency to protect future U.S. presidents. Protection for presidents-elect and presidents’ immediate families were added to the agency’s duties in 1908 and 1917, respectively.

(U.S. Secret Service)

In a ceremony held in Paris on this day in 1884, the completed Statue of Liberty was formally presented to the U.S. ambassador as a commemoration of the friendship between France and the United States. The idea was born in 1865, when the French historian and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye proposed a monument to commemorate the upcoming centennial of U.S. independence in 1876, the perseverance of American democracy and the liberation of the nation’s slaves. Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi came up with sketches of a giant figure of a robed woman holding a torch, possibly based on a statue he had previously proposed for the opening of the Suez Canal. He travelled to the U.S. to drum up fundraising, which also had help from publisher Joseph Pulitzer and Emma Lazurus’ poem, which was inscribed on the statue’s pedestal. From Paris it was disassembled and eventually rebuilt on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor in 1886.

(History.com)

On the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s last attempt at breaking the Union line ended in disastrous failure, bringing the most decisive battle of the Civil War to an end. In June 1863, Lee launched his second invasion of the Union in less than a year, leading his 75,000-man Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River, through Maryland and into Pennsylvania in hopes of a major win on Northern soil. On July 1, a Confederate division marched into Gettysburg hoping to seize supplies but instead met three brigades of Union cavalry. Fighting ensued for the next two days and Lee’s men withdrew their positions on the night of July 4. The Battle of Gettysburg cost the Union 23,000 killed, wounded, or missing in action, while Confederates suffered some 25,000 casualties. It was a major turning point in the war, which ended two years later.

(History.com)

On this day in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House. It had been 10 years since the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional and a growing number of supporters backed the Civil Rights movement. President John F. Kennedy had made the bill part of his platform and Johnson served as chairman of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities. After Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson pushed the bill forward despite heavy opposition in the House of Representative and heated debate in the Senate. It was the most sweeping civil rights legislation passed by Congress since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, and prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education, outlawed racial segregation in public places such as schools, buses, parks and swimming pools, and laid the groundwork for other laws such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

(History.com)

Three days after the United Nations Security Council voted to provide military assistance to South Korea, on July 1, 1950, President Harry S. Truman ordered US armed forces to assist in defending that nation from invading North Korean armies. This marked the official entry of the United States into the Korean War. Six days earlier, communist North Korean forces had invaded South Korea, catching troops off-guard. Over the next three years, the United States provided at least half of the U.N. ground forces in Korea and the vast majority of the air and sea forces used in the conflict against North Korea and, later, against communist China, which entered the war on the side of North Korea in late 1950. Nearly 55,000 Americans were killed in the war and over 100,000 were wounded. Cost estimates for the war ranged as high as $20 billion.

(History.com)

The Uniform Monday Holiday Act was signed into law June 28, 1968, and took effect Jan. 1, 1971. The law was designed to increase the number of three-day weekends for federal employees, which was a goal of the travel industry. It moved Washington’s Birthday, which had been observed on Feb. 22, and Memorial Day, which was observed May 30, from fixed dates to designated Mondays. It also established Columbus Day as a federal holiday designated not on Oct. 12 but on a Monday. Labor Day was also moved to the first Monday in September. For this reason, when it was created Martin Luther King Jr. Day was also scheduled on the third Monday in January. But the law removed Veterans Day from this list of “always-on-Monday” holidays, restoring it to its traditional date of Nov. 11, by a different law in 1975.

(Wikipedia)

Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the only black justice to serve on the nation’s highest court by that point and a forceful advocate for civil rights, announced his retirement on this day in 1991. Marshall, 82, cited his ″advancing age and medical condition″ in a letter to President George H.W. Bush announcing he would leave the court ″when my successor is qualified.″ As a justice, Marshall championed individual rights such as privacy and abolition of the death penalty, and has been a staunch defender of the 1973 ruling that granted women the right to an abortion. His departure gave Bush a chance to bolster the court’s conservative majority. Marshall was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. He had been the solicitor general and, as chief legal officer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the country’s preeminent civil rights figures. Marshall argued the case which resulted in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed school segregation. During his 23 years as legal director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and his tenure as the federal government’s solicitor general, Marshall argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29 of them.

(Associated Press)

On this day in 1956, Congress approved the Federal Highway Act, which allocated more than $30 billion for the construction of some 41,000 miles of interstate highways. It was the largest public construction project in U.S. history at that point. Several competing bills went through Congress before then, and that year President Dwight D. Eisenhower again called in his State of the Union address for a “modern, interstate highway system.” The Federal Highway Act of 1956 provided for a 65,000-kilometer national system of interstate and defense highways to be built over 13 years, with the federal government paying for 90 percent, or $24.8 billion. To raise funds for the project, Congress would increase the gas tax from 2 cents per gallon to 3 cents per gallon and impose a series of other highway user tax changes. On June 26, 1956, both houses approved the bill and three days the president signed it into law.

(History.com)

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