Also on this day
Lead Story
1998
Nearly four decades after he became the first American to orbit the Earth, Senator John Hershel Glenn, Jr., is launched into space again as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Discovery. At 77 years of age, Glenn was the oldest human ever to travel in space. During the nine-day...
American Revolution
1777
John Hancock resigns his position as president of the Continental Congress, due to a prolonged illness, on this day in 1777. Hancock was the first member of the Continental Congress to sign the Declaration of Independence and is perhaps best known for his bold signature on the ground-breaking document.
First elected...
Automotive
1971
Duane Allman, a slide guitarist and the leader of the Allman Brothers Band, is killed on this day in 1971 when he loses control of his motorcycle and drives into the side of a flatbed truck in Macon, Georgia. He was 24 years old. After Allman’s death, his band continued...
Civil War
1863
On this day in 1863, the Battle of Wauhatchie (also known as the Battle of Brown’s Ferry) concludesas Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s troopsopen a supply line into Chattanooga, Tennessee, when they drive away a Confederate attack by General James Longstreet. Although the Confederates still held the high ground above...
Cold War
1956
Israeli armed forces push into Egypt toward the Suez Canal, initiating the Suez Crisis. They would soon be joined by French and British forces, creating a serious Cold War problem in the Middle East.
The catalyst for the joint Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt was the nationalization of the Suez Canal...
Crime
1925
On this day in 1925, Dominick Dunne, a best-selling author, journalist and TV personality who often covered high-profile murder cases, is born in Hartford, Connecticut.
Dunne, whose father was a heart surgeon, was the second of six children. He served in the Army during World War II, and received a Bronze...
Disaster
1948
Killer smog continues to hover over Donora, Pennsylvania, on this day in 1948. Over a five-day period, the smog killed about 20 people and made thousands more seriously ill.
Donora was a town of 14,000 people on the Monongahela River in a valley surrounded by hills. The town was home to...
General Interest
1618
Sir Walter Raleigh, English adventurer, writer, and favorite courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, is beheaded in London, under a sentence brought against him 15 years earlier for conspiracy against King James I.
During Elizabeth’s reign, Raleighorganized three major expeditions to America, including the first English settlement in America, in 1587—the ill-fated...
1929
Black Tuesday hits Wall Street as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading. In the aftermath...
Hollywood
1947
On this day in 1947, the actor Richard Dreyfuss, who will rise to fame in Hollywood in the 1970s with starring roles in such movies as American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goodbye Girl, is born in Brooklyn, New York.
Dreyfuss, who registered as a conscientious...
Literary
1740
James Boswell is born on this day in Edinburgh to an ancient Scottish family. His father was a judge, the Lord of Auchinleck, and Boswell was heir to the title and a large fortune. He studied at the University of Edinburgh but ran away to London and was brought back...
Music
1966
To this day, no one can say with absolute certainty who the leader of ?(Question Mark) and the Mysterians really is. Is he—as literalists would have us believe—the former Rudy Martinez, a Mexican-born and Michigan-raised earthling who legally changed his name to a punctuation mark? Or is he truly the...
Old West
1858
On this day in 1858, the first store opens in a small frontier town in Colorado Territory that a month later will take the name of Denver in a shameless ploy to curry favor with Kansas Territorial Gover nor James W. Denver.
The brainchild of a town promoter and...
Presidential
1901
On this day in 1901, President William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, is executed in the electric chair at Auburn Prison in New York. Czolgosz had shot McKinley on September 6, 1901; the president succumbed to his wounds eight days later.
McKinley was shaking hands in a long reception line at the...
Sports
1948
On October 29, 1948, featherweight boxers Sandy Saddler and Willie Pep meet for the first time in the ring at Madison Square Garden. Saddler, a strong puncher, knocked out the diminutive Pep in the fourth round. The two fought four times in all—Saddler won three—and the matchups were increasingly bitter....
Vietnam War
1971
The total number of U.S. troops remaining in Vietnam drops to 196,700–the lowest level since January 1966. This was a result of the Vietnamization program announced by President Richard Nixon at the June 1969 Midway Conference. U.S. troops were to be withdrawn as the South Vietnamese assumed more...
World War I
1915
On October 29, 1915, Jane Addams, a leading American social activist, writes to United States President Woodrow Wilson, warning him of the potential dangers of readying the country to enter the First World War.
When World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, President Wilson accurately reflected the isolationist...
World War II
1942
On this day in 1942, leading British clergymen and political figures hold a public meeting to register their outrage over the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany.
In a message sent to the meeting, Prime Minister Winston Churchill summed up the sentiments of all present: “The systematic cruelties to which the...