Also on this day
Lead Story
1933
On March 4, 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is inaugurated as the 32nd president of the United States. In his famous inaugural address, delivered outside the east wing of the U.S. Capitol, Roosevelt outlined his “New Deal”–an expansion of the federal government as an...
American Revolution
1776
Under the cover of constant bombing from American artillery, Brigadier General John Thomas slips 2,000 troops, cannons and artillery into position at Dorchester Heights, just south of Boston, on this day in 1776. Under orders from General George Washington, Thomas and his troops worked through the night digging trenches,...
Civil War
1861
On this day in 1861, Abraham Lincoln becomes the 16th president of the United States. In his inauguration speechLincoln extended an olive branch to the South, but also made it clear that he intended to enforce federal laws in the states that seceded.Since Lincoln’s election in November 1860, seven states...
Cold War
1954
Speaking before the 10th Inter-American Conference, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warns that “international communism” is making inroads in the Western Hemisphere and asks the nations of Latin America to condemn this danger. Dulles’s speech was part of a series of actions designed to put pressure on the leftist...
Crime
1944
Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the head of Murder, Inc., is executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Lepke was the leader of the country’s largest crime syndicate throughout the 1930s and was making nearly $50 million a year from his various enterprises. His downfall came when several members of his...
2005
On this day in 2005, billionaire mogul Martha Stewart is released from a federal prison near Alderson, West Virginia, after serving five months for lying about her sale of ImClone stock in 2001. After her televised exit from the facility, Stewart flew on a chartered jet from nearby Greenbrier...
Disaster
1962
A Trans-African DC-7 crashes on takeoff in Douala, Cameroon, on this day in 1962. A simple mechanical failure doomed the flight and its 111 passengers and crew. This was the first single-airplane disaster in history in which more than 100 people died. The DC-7 was a...
General Interest
1789
The first session of the U.S. Congress is held in New York City as the U.S. Constitution takes effect. However, of the 22 senators and 59 representatives called to represent the 11 states who had ratified the document, only nine senators and 13 representatives showed up to begin negotiations...
Hollywood
1995
The larger-than-life comedic star John Candy dies suddenly of a heart attack on this day in 1995, at the age of 43. At the time of his death, he was living near Durango, Mexico, while filming Wagons East, a Western comedy co-starring the comedian Richard Lewis.
Born in 1950, Candy’s first...
Literary
1952
Ernest Hemingway completes his short novel The Old Man and the Sea. He wrote his publisher the same day, saying he had finished the book and that it was the best writing he had ever done. The critics agreed: The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and became one...
1965
On this day in 1965, Khaled Hosseini, author of the best-selling novel “The Kite Runner,” is born in Kabul, Afghanistan. Hosseini’s semiautobiographical book was credited with helping to educate Western readers about Afghanistan, a country many of them knew little about.
As a child, Hosseini, the oldest of five siblings,...
Music
1966
In England, no one took much notice of the John Lennon quotation that later set off a media frenzy in America. Chalk it up to a fundamental difference in religious outlook between Britain and America, or to a fundamental difference in sense of humor. Whatever the reason, it was only...
Old West
1868
Jesse Chisholm, who blazed one of the West’s most famous trails, dies in Oklahoma of food poisoning.
Although the trail named for him later came to be one of the major cattle-drive routes between Texas and Kansas, Jesse Chisholm was a frontier trader, not a cattleman. Born in Tennessee of...
Presidential
1829
On this day in 1829, Andrew Jackson upholds an inaugural tradition begun by Thomas Jefferson and hosts an open house at the White House.
After Jackson’s swearing-in ceremony and address to Congress, the new president returned to the White House to meet and greet a flock of politicians, celebrities and citizens....
1952
On this day in 1952, actor and future President Ronald Reagan marries his second wife, actress Nancy Davis. The couple wed in Los Angeles at the Little Brown Church in the Valley.
Nancy Davis, whose real name is Anne Frances Robbins, met her husband in 1951. (MGM Studios signed her to...
Sports
1888
On this day in 1888, Knute Rockne is born in Voss, Norway. He would go on to become one of the most successful coaches in the history of college football, coaching Notre Dame during their golden era in the 1920s. Rockne won three undisputed national championships with the Fighting Irish,...
Vietnam War
1968
In a draft memorandum to the president, the Ad Hoc Task Force on Vietnam advises that the administration send 22,000 more troops to Vietnam, but make deployment of the additional 185,000 men previously requested by Gen. William Westmoreland (senior U.S. commander in Vietnam) contingent on future developments.
The Task Force was...
World War I
1913
With trouble brewing between the great nations of Europe, Thomas Woodrow Wilson takes office as the 28th president of the United States on this day in 1913, in Washington, D.C.
The Virginia-born son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson became president of Princeton University in 1902; he resigned the post in 1910...
World War II
1941
The British navy raids a German position off the coast of Norway and inside the Arctic Circle—the Lofoten Islands. The raid, code name Operation Claymore, proved highly destructive of its target—an armed German trawler—but ultimately a failure in achieving its objective, the capture of an Enigma decoding machine.
The Brits severely...
1944
The U.S. Eighth Air Force launches the first American bombing raid against the German capital.
The British Royal Air Force (RAF) had been conducting night raids against Berlin and other German cities since November 1943, suffering losses at increasingly heavy rates. While the British inflicted significant damage against their targets, the...
