First episode of “60 Minutes” airs

The Judiciary Act of 1789 is passed by Congress and signed by President George Washington, establishing the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court initially had six justices.

On September 24, 1941, the Japanese consul in Hawaii is instructed to divide Pearl Harbor into five zones and calculate the number of battleships in each zone—and report the findings back to Japan. Relations between the United States and Japan had been deteriorating quickly since Japan’s occupation of Indo-China and the implicit menacing of the […]

On September 24, 1948, Mildred Gillars—the notorious American citizen known as “Axis Sally,” who had been living in Germany and broadcasting Nazi radio propaganda during World War II—pleads not guilty to eight counts of treason. Her lawyer, James J. Laughlin, tells the judge that he wants to call President Harry S. Truman as a witness, […]

On September 24, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson receives a special commission’s report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which had occurred on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Since the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed by a man named Jack Ruby almost immediately after murdering Kennedy, Oswald’s motive for assassinating the […]

Neil LaFeve, the game warden at Sensiba Wildlife Area in Wisconsin, is reported missing. When LaFeve, who was celebrating his 32nd birthday, did not show up to his own party, his wife called the police. The next morning, authorities found LaFeve’s truck. A pool of blood and two .22-caliber shells lay nearby. LaFeve’s headless body […]

More than 15 years after it was first established, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opens on the National Mall on September 24, 2016. Barack Obama, the nation’s first African American president, leads the ceremony and officially opens the museum by ringing the Freedom Bell, a bell from an African American Baptist […]