U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, killed in plane crash

Near present-day St. Augustine, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León comes ashore on the Florida coast, and claims the territory for the Spanish crown. Native Americans inhabited the area that became known as Florida for thousands of years before any European contact. Although other European navigators may have sighted the Florida peninsula before, Ponce de León is credited with the […]

The legendary Texas Ranger and frontiersman “Big Foot” Wallace is born in Lexington, Virginia. In 1836, 19-year-old William Alexander Anderson Wallace received news that one of his brothers had been killed in the Battle of Goliad, an early confrontation in the Texan war of independence with Mexico. Pledging to “take pay of the Mexicans” for […]

The Rebel capital of Richmond, Virginia, falls to the Union, the most significant sign that the Confederacy is nearing its final days. For ten months, General Ulysses S. Grant had tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate the city. After Lee made a desperate attack against Fort Stedman along the Union line on March 25, Grant prepared for […]

One of America’s most famous criminals, Jesse James, is shot to death by fellow gang member Bob Ford, who betrayed James for reward money. For 16 years, Jesse and his brother, Frank, committed robberies and murders throughout the Midwest. Detective magazines and pulp novels glamorized the James gang, turning them into mythical Robin Hoods who […]

“The Lousiana Hayride,” a country radio program broadcast out of Shreveport, Louisiana, premieres. The show would launch the careers not only of several country music giants, but also of a young, genre-crossing singer named Elvis Presley, the future King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Even the most ardent non-fans of country music can probably name the […]

Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announces that the United States is moving to “Vietnamize” the war as rapidly as possible. By this, he meant that the responsibility for the fighting would be gradually transferred to the South Vietnamese as they became more combat capable. However, Laird emphasized that it would not serve the United States’ […]

At his small wilderness cabin near Lincoln, Montana, Theodore John Kaczynski is arrested by FBI agents and accused of being the Unabomber, the elusive terrorist blamed for 16 mail bombs that killed three people and injured 23 during an 18-year period. Kaczynski, born in Chicago in 1942, won a scholarship to study mathematics at Harvard […]