This Day In History: January 5, 1825 On this day in history, 1825, on a bitter cold day, a young Alexandre Dumas, soon to be famed playwright and novelist and current son of Thomas-Alaxandre who was once one of Napoleon’s generals, fights in his first duel. During the duel, Dumas successfully defeated his opponent almost immediately, but, according to his […]
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This Day In History: January 4, 1965 On this day in history, 1965, CBS purchased the Fender Guitar Company for $13 million from Leo Fender. For reference, this would be around $90 million today. This was also close to $2 million more than CBS paid for the New York Yankees just two years before. After CBS continually reduced the quality […]
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This Day In History: December 29, 1890 On this day in history, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry opened fire on a Lakota Native American encampment with four rapid fire Hotchkiss guns, killing 150-300 of the group, including women and children. Along with the dead Lakota, around 25 of the cavalry troops themselves were killed with another 39 wounded, largely due to […]
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This Day In History: December 23, 1823 On this day in history, 1823, the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, better known today as The Night Before Christmas or ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas was first published. The poem first appeared in the New York Sentinel with no author listed, having been delivered for publication by a friend of Clement […]
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This Day In History: December 21, 1898 On this day in history, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the radioactive element radium (in the form of radium chloride), extracting it from uraninite. They first removed the uranium from the uraninite sample and then found that the remaining matter was still radioactive, so investigated further. Along with the barium in the […]
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This Day In History: December 19, 1973 Much like Orson Welles before him, Johnny Carson once accidentally used his public platform to incite a public panic. On this day in history, 1973, Carson started a near month long toilet paper shortage in the United States. In his show, he stated, “You know what’s disappearing from the supermarket shelves? Toilet paper… […]
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This Day In History: December 16, 1916 On this day in history, 1916, the “Mad Monk”, Grigori Rasputin, was murdered by members of the Russian aristocracy. The exact events surrounding his death have given rise to a variety of stories, much of which are probably false. So what actually happened? First, a brief background on Rasputin: Grigori Rasputin was born […]
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This Day In History: December 14, 1903 On this day in history, 1903, the Wright brothers took their Wright Flyer out in their first attempt to fly it. The date of their first attempt would have been a day sooner, but they had promised their dad they would not fly on the Sabbath, so waited until Monday the 14th. The […]
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This Day In History: December 13, 1809 On this day in history, 1809, the woman who would soon become the first to survive an oophorectomy was diagnosed as not being pregnant past term, as she had thought, but having an extremely large tumor, which isn’t that different than a baby when you think about it, but you know… bigger, in […]
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This Day In History: December 12, 1901 On this day in history, 1901, Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi’s radio device became the first such device to successfully transmit a signal all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, from Poldhu, Cornwall, UK to Signal Hill in St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada, a span of about 2100 miles. His receiving device used a […]
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This Day In History: December 11, 1972 On this day in history, 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan landed on the moon, becoming the last human beings to walk on the moon. Throughout the Apollo missions which spanned from 1961 to 1972, a total of 24 people journeyed to the moon with twelve of them getting to […]
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This Day In History: December 9, 1872 On this day in history, 1872, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback became the first person of African American descent to serve as the governor of a U.S. state. Pinchback was born the son of a freed slave (African-Cherokee-Welsh-German descent) and her former white owner (Scottish-Irish-Welsh-German descent), who married her. His father was reasonably well […]
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This Day In History: December 8, 2010 On this day just one year ago, SpaceX became the first privately held entity to successfully launch a spacecraft into orbit and then subsequently recover it (they were also the first private company to launch something in orbit with a liquid-fueled vehicle around a year earlier when their Falcon 1 rocket put a […]
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This Day In History: December 5, 1933 On this day in history, 1933, Prohibition officially ended when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, originally proposed by Congress on February 20, 1933. Once ratified, this constitutional amendment repealed the 18 Amendment. The 18th Amendment, passed in 1919, banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in […]
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This Day In History: December 4, 1872 On this day in 1872, the crew of the British craft Dei Gratia spotted the Mary Celeste (originally named The Amazon before being purchased and rechristened) still under sail, but yawing slightly. Upon closer inspection, they observed that no members of the crew were on deck. After several hours of watching from a […]
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This Day In History: Dec 2, 1942 On this day in history, at 3:25 pm CST, 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, famed physicist and Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, the “father of the atomic bomb”, and his team successfully started the word’s first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on a racquetball court under the west stands of Stagg […]
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This Day In History: December 1, 1955 On this day in history in 1955, Rosa Parks’ simple act of refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama sparks the Montgomery Bus Boycott which in turn stimulates the Civil Rights Movement. It also vaulted Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight as […]
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This Day In History: November 30, 1954 On this date in history in 1954 a meteorite hit 31 year old Ann Elizabeth Hodges who was napping in the living room of her home at the time. This made her the first known human being to be struck by an extraterrestrial object. Somewhat humorously, Hodges lived across the street from the […]
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