Lindbergh, who became the first worldwide celebrity five years earlier when he flew The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic, and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh discovered a ransom note in their 20-month-old child’s empty room on March 1. The kidnapper had used a ladder to climb up to the open second-floor window and had left muddy footprints in the room. In barely legible English, the ransom note demanded $50,000.

The crime captured the attention of the entire nation. The Lindbergh family was inundated by offers of assistance and false clues. Even Al Capone offered his help from prison, though it of course was conditioned on his release. For three days, investigators had found nothing and there was no further word from the kidnappers. Then, a new letter showed up, this time demanding $70,000.

It wasn’t until April 2 that the kidnappers gave instructions for dropping off the money. When the money was finally delivered, the kidnappers indicated that little baby Charles was on a boat called Nelly off the coast of Massachusetts. However, after an exhaustive search of every port, there was no sign of either the boat or the child.

On May 12, a renewed search of the area near the Lindbergh mansion turned up the baby’s body. He had been killed the night of the kidnapping and was found less than a mile from the home. The heartbroken Lindberghs ended up donating the home to charity and moved away.

The kidnapping looked like it would go unsolved until September 1934, when a marked bill from the ransom turned up. Suspicious of the driver who had given it to him, the gas station attendant who had accepted the bill wrote down his license plate number. It was tracked back to a German immigrant, Bruno Hauptmann. When his home was searched, detectives found $13,000 of Lindbergh ransom money.

Hauptmann claimed that a friend had given him the money to hold and that he had no connection to the crime. The resulting trial again was a national sensation. Famous writers Damon Runyan and Walter Winchell covered the trial. The prosecution’s case was not particularly strong. The main evidence, apart from the money, was testimony from handwriting experts that the ransom note had been written by Hauptmann and his connection with the type of wood that was used to make the ladder.

Still, the evidence and intense public pressure was enough to convict Hauptmann. In April 1936 he was executed in the electric chair.

Kidnapping was made a federal crime in the aftermath of this high-profile crime.

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A cameraman named H.J. Miles filmed the president while riding in a parade in his honor. The resulting short move was titled The President’s Carriage and was later played on “nickelodeons” in arcades across America. The film showed Roosevelt riding in a carriage and escorted by the Ninth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, which was unusual for the time, according to the Library of Congress and contemporary newspapers, because it was an all-Black company.

Roosevelt was the first president to take advantage of the impact motion pictures could have on the presidency. The photogenic president encouraged filmmakers to document his official duties and post-presidential personal activities until his death in 1919. He purposely played directly to the camera with huge gestures and thundering speeches. The Library of Congress holds much of the original film footage, including that of his second inaugural ceremony in 1905, a visit to Panama in 1906 and an African safari in 1909. Roosevelt appeared on camera with many notable people of his time, including European kings and queens, as well as Hopi Indians and Masai warriors in Africa. In 1912, Roosevelt’s unsuccessful campaign for president on the Progressive ticket was also captured on film. Later that year, Roosevelt again made two presidential “firsts.” On October 11, 1910, he became the first (former) president to not only fly in an airplane but also to be filmed while flying in an airplane.

Even Roosevelt’s funeral in Oyster Bay, New York, in 1919 was memorialized on camera. The filmmaker documented the procession and memorial service, and included shots of Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft.

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At the end of World War II, Germany was divided into four sectors administered by the four major Allied powers: the USSR, the United States, Britain and France. Berlin, the German capital, was likewise divided into four sectors, even though it was located deep within the Soviet sector of eastern Germany. The future of Germany and Berlin was a major sticking point in postwar treaty talks, especially after the United States, Britain, and France sought to unite their occupation zones into a single economic zone. In March 1948, the Soviet Union quit the Allied Control Council governing occupied Germany over this issue. In May, the three Western powers agreed to the imminent formation of West Germany, a nation that would exist entirely independent of Soviet-occupied eastern Germany. The three western sectors of Berlin were united as West Berlin, which was to be under the administration of West Germany.

On June 20, as a major step toward the establishment of a West German government, the Western powers introduced a new Deutsche mark currency in West Germany and West Berlin. The Soviets condemned this move as an attack on the East German currency and on June 24 began a blockade of all rail, road, and water communications between Berlin and the West. The four-power administration of Berlin had ceased with the unification of West Berlin, the Soviets said, and the Western powers no longer had a right to be there. With West Berlin’s food, fuel, and other necessities cut off, the Soviets reasoned, it would soon have to submit to Communist control.

Britain and the United States responded by initiating the largest airlift in history, flying 278,288 relief missions to the city during the next 14 months, resulting in the delivery of 2,326,406 tons of supplies. As the Soviets had cut off power to West Berlin, coal accounted for over two-thirds of the material delivered. In the opposite direction, return flights transported West Berlin’s industrial exports to the West. Flights were made around the clock, and at the height of the Berlin airlift, in April 1949, planes were landing in the city every minute. Tensions were high during the airlift, and three groups of U.S. strategic bombers were sent as reinforcements to Britain while the Soviet army presence in eastern Germany increased dramatically. The Soviets made no major effort to disrupt the airlift. As a countermeasure against the Soviet blockade, the Western powers also launched a trade embargo against eastern Germany and other Soviet bloc countries.

On May 12, 1949, the Soviets abandoned the blockade, and the first British and American convoys drove through 110 miles of Soviet Germany to reach West Berlin. On May 23, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was formally established. On October 7, the German Democratic Republic, a Communist state, was proclaimed in East Germany. The Berlin airlift continued until September 30, in an effort to build up a year’s supply of essential goods for West Berlin in the event of another Soviet blockade. Another blockade did not occur, but Cold War tensions over Berlin remained high, culminating in the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

With the gradual waning of Soviet power in the late 1980s, the Communist Party in East Germany began to lose its grip on power. Tens of thousands of East Germans began to flee the nation, and by late 1989 the Berlin Wall started to come down. Shortly thereafter, talks between East and West German officials, joined by officials from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the USSR, began to explore the possibility of reunification, which was achieved on October 3, 1990. Two months following reunification, all-German elections took place and Helmut Kohl became the first chancellor of the reunified Germany. Although this action came more than a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, for many observers the reunification of Germany effectively marked the end of the Cold War.

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He then promptly fell back to sleep. "I had no idea I'd written it," RIchards wrote in his 2010 memoir Life.

“When I woke up in the morning, the tape had run out,” Richards recalled many years later. “I put it back on, and there’s this, maybe, 30 seconds of ‘Satisfaction,’ in a very drowsy sort of rendition. And then it suddenly—the guitar goes ‘CLANG,” and then there’s like 45 minutes of snoring.”

It wasn’t much to go on, but he played it for Mick Jagger later that same day. “He only had the first bit, and then he had the riff,” Jagger recalls. “It sounded like a country sort of thing on acoustic guitar—it didn’t sound like rock. But he didn’t really like it, he thought it was a joke… He really didn’t think it was single material, and we all said, ‘You’re off your head.’ Which he was, of course.”

With verses written by Jagger—Richards had already come up with the line “I can’t get no satisfaction”—the Stones took the song into the Chess studios in Chicago on May 10, 1965, and completed it on May 12 after a flight to Los Angeles and an 18-hour recording session at RCA. It was there that Richards hooked up an early Gibson version of a fuzz box to his guitar and gave a riff he’d initially envisioned being played by horns its distinctive, iconic sound.

Though the Stones at the time were already midway through their third U.S. tour, their only bona fide American hits to date were “Time Is On My Side” and the recently released “The Last Time.” “Satisfaction” was the song that would catapult them to superstar status. Forty years later, when Rolling Stone magazine ranked “Satisfaction” #2 on its list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” it put the following historical perspective on the riff Keith Richards discovered on this day in 1965: “That spark in the night…was the crossroads: the point at which the rickety jump and puppy love of early rock and roll became rock.”

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On May 12, 1975, the U.S. freighter Mayaguez and its 39-man crew was captured by gunboats of the Cambodian navy. Cambodia had fallen to communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, in April 1975. The Cambodian authorities imprisoned the American crew, pending an investigation of the ship and why it had sailed into waters claimed by Cambodia. The response of the United States government was quick. President Gerald Ford called the Cambodian seizure of the Mayaguez an “act of piracy” and promised swift action to rescue the captured Americans.

In part, Ford’s aggressive attitude to the incident was a by-product of the American failure in Vietnam. In January 1973, U.S. forces had withdrawn from South Vietnam, ending years of a bloody and inconclusive attempt to forestall communist rule of that nation. In the time since the U.S. withdrawal, a number of conservative politicians and intellectuals in the United States had begun to question America’s “credibility” in the international field, suggesting that the country’s loss of will in Vietnam now encouraged enemies around the world to challenge America with seeming impunity. The Cambodian seizure of the Mayaguez appeared to be just such a challenge.

On May 14, President Ford ordered the bombing of the Cambodian port where the gunboats had come from and sent Marines to attack the island of Koh Tang, where the prisoners were being held. Unfortunately, the military action was probably unnecessary. The Cambodian government was already in the process of releasing the crew of the Mayaguez and the ship. Forty-one Americans died, most of them in an accidental explosion during the attack. Most Americans, however, cheered the action as evidence that the United States was once again willing to use military might to slap down potential enemies.

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By the end of that summer, Bob Dylan would be known to millions who watched or witnessed his performances at the March on Washington, and millions more who did not know Dylan himself would know and love his music thanks to Peter, Paul and Mary’s smash-hit cover version of “Blowin’ In The Wind.” But back in May, Dylan was still just another aspiring musician with a passionate niche following but no national profile whatsoever. His second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, had not yet been released, but he had secured what would surely be his big break with an invitation to perform on "The Ed Sullivan Show." That appearance never happened.

The song that caused the flap was “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a satirical talking-blues number skewering the ultra-conservative John Birch Society and its tendency to see covert members of an international Communist conspiracy behind every tree. Dylan had auditioned “John Birch” days earlier and had run through it for Ed Sullivan himself without any concern being raised. But during dress rehearsal on the day of the show, an executive from the CBS Standards and Practices department informed the show’s producers that they could not allow Dylan to go forward singing “John Birch.” While many of the song’s lyrics about hunting down “reds” were merely humorous—”Looked up my chimney hole/Looked down deep inside my toilet bowl/They got away!“—others raised the fear of a defamation lawsuit in the minds of CBS’s lawyers. Rather than choose a new number to perform or change his song’s lyrics, Dylan stormed off the set in angry protest.

Or so goes the legend that helped establish Dylan’s public reputation as an artist of uncompromising integrity. In reality, Bob Dylan was polite and respectful in declining to accede to the network’s wishes. “I explained the situation to Bob and asked him if he wanted to do something else,” recalls "Ed Sullivan Show" producer Bob Precht, “and Bob, quite appropriately, said ‘No, this is what I want to do. If I can’t play my song, I’d rather not appear on the show.'” It hardly mattered whether Dylan’s alleged tantrum was fact or reality. The story got widespread media attention in the days that followed, causing Ed Sullivan himself to denounce the network’s decision in published interviews. In the end, however, the free publicity Bob Dylan received may have done more for his career than his abortive national-television appearance scheduled for this day in 1963 ever could have.

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The daughter of New England intellectuals who stressed rigorous exercise and independent thinking, Hepburn studied at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and went on to become a stage actress. She first gained notice on Broadway in 1932, for her performance in The Warrior’s Husband. After a screen test, Hepburn signed with RKO studios and landed her first role, in A Bill of Divorcement (1932), starring John Barrymore and directed by George Cukor, who would become Hepburn’s frequent director and one of her closest friends. Critics and fans alike immediately took note of the young actress, with her unconventional beauty and upper-crust New England accent, as a fresh presence on screen.

For Morning Glory (1933), only her third movie, Hepburn won an Academy Award for Best Actress. It was the first of 12 Oscar nominations she would garner over the course of her career, a record that would stand until 2003, when Meryl Streep received her 13th nomination. Hepburn would win three more Oscars—for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), A Lion in Winter (1968) and On Golden Pond (1981)—but never attended the ceremony to collect any of them.

Hepburn’s next few films with RKO had mixed results, and she became personally unpopular with many for her refusal to play along with the “rules” of fame and glamour that governed the industry. Fiercely independent and strong-willed, she wore trousers and no makeup, and refused to pose for pictures, grant interviews or sign autographs. By then recognized as one of the most talented actresses in Hollywood, Hepburn also earned a reputation for being arrogant and self-absorbed on-set. She appeared more sympathetic in Stage Door (1937) and Bringing Up Baby (1938), although audiences failed to respond to the second film, co-starring Cary Grant and now regarded as a beloved classic.

Though her career was stalled, Hepburn refused to give up; instead, she decided to change gears by buying out her contract at RKO. The change gave her far more control than other performers—and especially other actresses—in the age of the studio system. Hepburn returned to Broadway in 1938’s The Philadelphia Story, written especially for her by Philip Barry. Hepburn’s sometime lover, Howard Hughes, bought the screenplay rights for her, and she sold them to Louis B. Mayer at MGM on the condition that she star. With Grant and Jimmy Stewart signed on, the 1940 film was a huge hit.

In 1942, Hepburn played a political journalist who falls in love with a sportswriter in another hit, Woman of the Year. Her co-star in the film was Spencer Tracy, with whom Hepburn began a romantic relationship that would become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated love stories. A devout Catholic, Tracy was unwilling to divorce his wife, but he lived quietly with Hepburn for the next 27 years. The couple acted in nine films together, including Adam’s Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Tracy died just weeks after shooting was completed on the last film. Hepburn, who had withdrawn from filmmaking for a period of several years to care for her ailing lover, didn’t publicly discuss the relationship until after Tracy’s widow died in 1983. She was married once, to the Philadelphia broker Ludlow Ogden Smith, from 1928 to 1934.

Hepburn continued to appear in films and on television through the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s, though she frequently announced that this or that performance would be her last. She also returned to Broadway late in her career, winning praise for her roles in Coco (1969), A Matter of Gravity (1976) and The West Side Waltz (1981). In 1991, she published a bestselling autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, which impressed fans with its characteristic forthrightness and brisk candor. Hepburn made her final screen appearance in 1994’s Love Affair, a remake of the classic 1939 film. She died on June 29, 2003, at the age of 96.

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Alfonso de Portago was only 30 miles from the finish line of the 1,000-mile open-road race when one of the tires of his 3.8-liter fire-red Ferrari blew out. He crashed on a straightaway between the towns of Goito and Guidizzolo, traveling at a speed of nearly 150 miles per hour. At the time of the crash, he was in fourth place, even though it was his first time driving the hazardous, twisting Mille Miglia course that ran round trip between Brescia and Rome. According to Sports Illustrated, it was the "worst composite disaster" in racing since the Le Mans tragedy of 1955, only two years earlier.

Don Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, the 17th Marquis de Portago, was a larger-than-life figure, the son of a Spanish nobleman and godson to Spain’s King Alfonso VIII. Portago became a fierce competitor across many sports, including polo, steeplechase, horse racing, swimming and jai-alai. He even competed as a member of Spain's one and only Olympic bobsleigh team in 1956. Known as an inveterate thrill seeker, he earned a pilot’s license at age 17, but quickly lost it after reputedly flying a borrowed plane under a London bridge to win a $500 bet.

Portago's deadly crash killed nine spectators when his car vaulted over a barrier and into the dense crowd of onlookers. The tragedy marked the end of the Mille Miglia, a notorious road race already marred by gruesome accidents. Journalist Ken W. Purdy, who knew Portago, wrote in Car & Driver magazine that the legendary athlete "was an adornment in the world…a pillar of fire in the night, producing no useful heat or light, perhaps, but a glory to see nonetheless."

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With the victory, the British captured more than 3,000 Patriots and a great quantity of munitions and equipment, losing only 250 killed and wounded in the process. Confident of British control in the South, Lieutenant General Clinton sailed north to New York after the victory, having learned of an impending French expedition to the British-occupied northern state. He left General Charles Cornwallis in command of 8,300 British forces in the South.

South Carolina was a deeply divided state, and the British presence let loose the full violence of a civil war upon the population. First, the British used Loyalists to pacify the Patriot population; the Patriots returned the violence in kind. The guerrilla warfare strategies employed by Patriots Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter and Nathanael Greene throughout the Carolina campaign of 1780-81 eventually chased the far more numerous British force into Virginia, where they eventually surrendered at Yorktown on October 19, 1781.

Having suffered the humiliation of surrendering to the British at Charleston, Major General Lincoln was able to turn the tables and accept Cornwallis’ ceremonial surrender to General George Washington at Yorktown on October 20.

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A tough-as-nails Texan, Anthony Joseph Foyt, Jr. raced midget cars—smaller vehicles designed to be driven in races of shorter distances—and stock cars before moving up to bigger things in 1958, when he entered his first Indianapolis 500 race. Foyt won his first Indy 500 crown in 1961, when rival Eddie Sachs was forced to make a tire change in the final laps, giving Foyt the chance to overtake him and win with a then-record average speed of 139.13 mph.

The 1964 season saw Foyt earn a record-setting winning percentage of .769 with 10 wins in 13 races. His most important win that year came in the Indy 500, which he finished with an average speed of 147.45 mph. After a near-fatal crash in a stock car race in 1965–in which he broke his back, fractured his ankle and suffered severe chest injuries–Foyt came back to continue his string of impressive achievements. In 1967, he won his third Indy 500 in a car he had designed himself, with his father Tony as chief mechanic. Two weeks later, he traveled to France and won the 24 Hours of LeMans international competition with teammate Don Gurney. With a win at the Daytona 500 in 1972, Foyt became the first driver to win all three major races in motor sports: the Indy 500, the Daytona 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

In addition to the records for most total victories (67), most national championships (7) and most victories in one season (10), Foyt also has the most consecutive Indy 500 starts: He competed in the race for 35 straight years. His fourth win came in 1977, when the 42-year-old Foyt screamed around the track at an average speed of 161.331 mph. Only three other men have equaled his record of four Indy 500 wins.

In 1989, Foyt became the first driver inducted into the brand-new Motor Sports Hall of Fame in Novi, Michigan. He practiced at the Indy 500 track in 1993, but retired on the first day of qualifying races. Apart from auto racing teams, Foyt’s later business interests have included car dealerships, funeral homes, oil investments and thoroughbred racehorses.

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On his return home, Johnson echoed domino theory proponents, saying that the loss of Vietnam would compel the United States to fight “on the beaches of Waikiki” and eventually on “our own shores.”

With the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Johnson became president and inherited a deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. Over time, he escalated the Vietnam War, ultimately committing more than 500,000 U.S. troops to Vietnam.

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