Also on this day
Lead Story
1895
On this day in 1895, the world’s first commercial movie screening takes place at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the Cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers unveiled their invention to the public in March 1895...
American Revolution
1781
British troops commanded by Major James Henry Craig are posted at John’s Island, just outside of Charleston, South Carolina, on this day in 1781. Craig had evacuated his troops from Wilmington, North Carolina, a little over a month earlier on November 14. The Patriots planned to remove Craig...
Automotive
1938
On December 28, 1938, the silent-film star Florence Lawrence commits suicide in Beverly Hills. She was 52 years old. Though she was best known for her roles in nearly 250 films, Lawrence was also an inventor: She designed the first “auto signaling arm,” a mechanical turn signal, along with the...
Civil War
1822
On this day in 1822, Confederate General William Taliaferro is born in Gloucester County, Virginia. Taliaferro served under General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson for the first part of the war,and spent the second half preparing coastal defenses in the lower South. Taliaferro attended William and Mary College and Harvard Law...
Cold War
1973
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “literary investigation” of the police-state system in the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, is published in the original Russian in Paris. The book was the first of the three-volume work. The brutal and uncompromising description of political repression and terror was quickly translated into many...
Crime
1793
Thomas Paine is arrested in France for treason. Though the charges against him were never detailed, he had been tried in absentia on December 26 and convicted. Before moving to France, Paine was an instrumental figure in the American Revolution as the author of Common Sense, writings used by George...
Disaster
1908
An earthquake in Sicily kills over 100,000 people and destroys several towns on this day in 1908. The 7.5-magnitude tremor off the coast of the large island was also responsible for deaths on the Italian mainland.
Sicily is situated near the spot where the European and African continental plates collide. The...
General Interest
1832
Citing political differences with President Andrew Jackson and a desire to fill a vacant Senate seat in South Carolina, John C. Calhoun becomes the first vice president in U.S. history to resign the office.Born near Abbeville, South Carolina, in 1782, Calhoun was an advocate of states’ rights and a defender...
1869
The Knights of Labor, a labor union of tailors in Philadelphia, hold the first Labor Day ceremonies in American history. The Knights of Labor was established as a secret society of Pennsylvanian tailors earlier in the year and later grew into a national body that played an important role in...
1908
At dawn, the most destructive earthquake in recorded European history strikes the Straits of Messina in southern Italy, leveling the cities of Messina in Sicily and Reggio di Calabria on the Italian mainland. The earthquake and tsunami it caused killed an estimated 100,000 people.Sicily and Calabria are known as la...
1989
Alexander Dubcek, former Czechoslovak leader and architect of the “Prague Spring,” is elected chairman of the new multiparty Czechoslovak parliament. It was the first time Dubcek held public office since being deprived of Communist Party membership in 1970.The trend toward liberalization in Czechoslovakia began in 1963, and in 1968 reached...
Hollywood
1954
On this day in 1954, the Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington, who will go on to star in such movies as Malcolm X and Training Day, is born in Mount Vernon, New York. In 2002, for his performance as a corrupt cop in Training Day, Washington became the first black man...
Literary
1932
On this day in 1932, Manuel Puig is born in a small village in Argentina.
Puig grew up entranced by American movies and pop culture, spending many hours watching films or fantasizing about glamorous movie stars. In 1946, he went to boarding school in Buenos Aires, then attended the University of...
Music
1991
”It doesn’t take an Einstein to know that young people attending a rap concert…who have paid as much as $20 a ticket, would not be very happy and easy to control if they were unable to gain admission to the event because it was oversold.” Those were the words of...
Old West
1900
Convinced that her righteous campaign against alcohol justified her aggressive tactics, Carry Nation attacks a saloon in Wichita, Kansas, shattering a large mirror behind the bar and throwing rocks at a titillating painting of Cleopatra bathing.
Carry Nation’s lifelong battle against alcohol reflected a larger reformist spirit that swept through the...
Presidential
1856
On this day in 1856, future President Woodrow Wilson is born in Staunton, Virginia. He attended private schools and graduated from Princeton University in 1879 before studying law at the University of Virginia and earning his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He was hired by Princeton as a professor of...
Sports
1975
On this day in 1975, a crowd of 17,500 ice hockey fans watch HC CSKA (also called the Central Red Army) from the Soviet Union defeat the New York Rangers 7-3 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The game marked the kick-off of the first so-called “Super Series”–a...
Vietnam War
1972
After 11 days of round-the-clock bombing (with the exception of a 36-hour break for Christmas), North Vietnamese officials agree to return to the peace negotiations in Paris.
The Linebacker II bombing was initiated on December 18 by President Richard Nixon when the North Vietnamese, who walked out of the peace negotiations...
World War I
1856
Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who will become the 28th president of the United States, is born on this day in Staunton, Virginia.
A former president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey, Wilson won election to his first term in the White House as a Democrat in 1912 on a campaign...
World War II
1941
On this day, Rear Admiral Ben Moreell requests authority from the Bureau of Navigation to create a contingent of construction units able to build everything from airfields to roads under battlefield conditions. These units would be known as the “Seabees”—for the first letters of Construction Battalion.
The men chosen for the...
