Today in History

[Duke of Buckingham]

I don't know what to do about the history thread. The usual size of the articles is of 20.000 words for post and in your case is 10.000. So I can not post the thread. I don't know what to do. I will think about it.

Sep 18, 1793:
Capitol cornerstone is laid

On this day in 1793, George Washington lays the cornerstone to the United States Capitol building, the home of the legislative branch of American government. The building would take nearly a century to complete, as architects came and went, the British set fire to it and it was called into use during the Civil War. Today, the Capitol building, with its famous cast-iron dome and important collection of American art, is part of the Capitol Complex, which includes six Congressional office buildings and three Library of Congress buildings, all developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

As a young nation, the United States had no permanent capital, and Congress met in eight different cities, including Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia, before 1791. In 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which gave President Washington the power to select a permanent home for the federal government. The following year, he chose what would become the District of Columbia from land provided by Maryland. Washington picked three commissioners to oversee the capital city's development and they in turn chose French engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant to come up with the design. However, L'Enfant clashed with the commissioners and was fired in 1792. A design competition was then held, with a Scotsman named William Thornton submitting the winning entry for the Capitol building. In September 1793, Washington laid the Capitol's cornerstone and the lengthy construction process, which would involve a line of project managers and architects, got under way.

In 1800, Congress moved into the Capitol's north wing. In 1807, the House of Representatives moved into the building's south wing, which was finished in 1811. During the War of 1812, the British invaded Washington, D.C., and set fire to the Capitol on August 24, 1814. A rainstorm saved the building from total destruction. Congress met in nearby temporary quarters from 1815 to 1819. In the early 1850s, work began to expand the Capitol to accommodate the growing number of Congressmen. In 1861, construction was temporarily halted while the Capitol was used by Union troops as a hospital and barracks. Following the war, expansions and modern upgrades to the building continued into the next century.

Today, the Capitol, which is visited by 3 million to 5 million people each year, has 540 rooms and covers a ground area of about four acres.



Sep 18, 1960:
Castro arrives in New York

Fidel Castro arrives in New York City as the head of the Cuban delegation to the United Nations. Castro's visit stirred indignation and admiration from various sectors of American society, and was climaxed by his speech to the United Nations on September 26.

By the time Castro arrived in New York City in September 1960, relations between the United States and Cuba were rapidly deteriorating. Since taking power in January 1959, Castro had infuriated the American government with his policies of nationalizing U.S. companies and investments in Cuba. Some American officials, such as Vice President Richard Nixon, believed that Castro was leaning perilously toward communism. (Castro did not publicly proclaim his adherence to communism until late-1961, when he declared that he was a "Marxist-Leninist".) In March 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to begin training Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro's regime. When the United States suspended the import of Cuban sugar in 1960, Castro's government turned to the Soviet Union for economic assistance. The Russians were happy to oblige.

In September 1960, Castro led a delegation to New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly. He and his entourage caused an immediate sensation by deciding to stay at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. While there, Castro met with a number of African-American leaders, including Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam and the poet Langston Hughes. On September 26, Castro delivered a blistering attack on what he termed American "aggression" and "imperialism." For over four hours, Castro lambasted U.S. policy toward Cuba and other nations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The United States, he declared, had "decreed the destruction" of his revolutionary government.

Castro's visit and lengthy public denunciation marked the final breaking point in relations between the U.S. and Cuba. In January 1961, the Eisenhower administration severed all diplomatic relations with Cuba. In April 1961, just a short time after taking office, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban exile force, armed and trained by the CIA, landed in Cuba. The attack was a fiasco. Castro's power in Cuba was solidified by his Bay of Pigs victory over the American "imperialists." Castro remained the undisputed leader of the communist government in Cuba for over four decades; meanwhile, relations between the United States and Cuba remained strained. In late July 2006, an unwell Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power to his younger brother Raul. Fidel Castro officially stepped down in February 2008.



Sep 18, 1634:
Anne Hutchinson arrives in the New World

Anne Hutchinson, an Englishwoman who would become an outspoken religious thinker in the American colonies, arrives at the Massachusetts Bay Colony with her family.

She settled in Cambridge and began organizing meetings of Boston women in her home, leading them in discussions of recent sermons and religious issues. Soon ministers and magistrates began attending her sessions as well. Hutchinson preached that faith alone was sufficient for salvation, and therefore that individuals had no need for the church or church law. By 1637, her influence had become so great that she was brought to trial and found guilty of heresy against Puritan orthodoxy. Banished from Massachusetts, she led a group of 70 followers to Rhode Island--Roger Williams' colony based on religious freedom--and established a settlement on the island of Aquidneck.

After the death of her husband in 1642, she settled near present-day Pelham Bay, New York, on the Long Island Sound. In 1643, she and all but one of her children were massacred in an Indian attack. She is recognized as the first notable woman religious leader in the American colonies.



Sep 18, 1961:
Bobby Vee earns a #1 hit with "Take Good Care Of My Baby"

In terms of his artistic significance, the early 1960s teen singer Bobby Vee may be a relatively slight and unimportant figure, but his place in music history is assured for reasons that have nothing to do with his modest chart accomplishments and charms as a performer. On this day in 1961, he reached the high point of his recording career when his recording of the Carole King-penned "Take Good Care Of My Baby" topped the U.S. pop charts. But the event that made that accomplishment possible—and assured Bobby Vee his place in history—came two-and-a-half years earlier, when a small plane carrying three young musicians crashed en route to his home town.

For songwriter Don McLean, February 3, 1959, was the Day the Music Died, but for 15-year-old Bobby Velline, it was the tragic day his star was born. The plane that crashed in an Iowa field early that morning was carrying musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson north from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Fargo, North Dakota, for the next show on the Winter Dance Party 1959 tour. It was a show that young Bobby Velline, an avowed rock-and-roller, was planning to attend as a fan until fate intervened.

Just weeks earlier, Velline had formed his first band, and now, as news of the deaths of Holly, Valens and Richardson spread via local radio, so, too, did another shocking piece of news. Adhering to the old maxim that the Show Must Go On, the business-minded organizers of the Winter Dance Party tour announced that they would not be canceling that night's show, despite the deaths of three out of four of the tour's headline acts. Surviving act Dion and the Belmonts would still be appearing, and now radio station KFGO was asking whether any local group would be available to join them. Presented with this morbid yet undeniably exciting opportunity, young Bobby Velline, who could play the chords and sing the lyrics to nearly every song his idol Buddy Holly had ever recorded, stepped up and volunteered.

Appearing second on the bill that night, Velline and his band the Shadows caught the eye and ear of a local promoter, and soon began playing gigs throughout the region. Within 18 months of his tragic big break, the wholesome teenager from Fargo was in the capable grip of the music industry's star-making machinery, recording the song that would give the husband-and-wife songwriting team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King its second #1 hit.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Sep 19, 1957:
Nevada is site of first-ever underground nuclear explosion

On this day in 1957, the United States detonates a 1.7 kiloton nuclear weapon in an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site (NTS), a 1,375 square mile research center located 65 miles north of Las Vegas. The test, known as Rainier, was the first fully contained underground detonation and produced no radioactive fallout. A modified W-25 warhead weighing 218 pounds and measuring 25.7 inches in diameter and 17.4 inches in length was used for the test. Rainier was part of a series of 29 nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons safety tests known as Operation Plumbbob that were conducted at the NTS between May 28, 1957, and October 7, 1957.

In December 1941, the U.S. government committed to building the world's first nuclear weapon when President Franklin Roosevelt authorized $2 billion in funding for what came to be known as the Manhattan Project. The first nuclear weapon test took place on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. A few weeks later, on August 6, 1945, with the U.S. at war against Japan, President Harry Truman authorized the dropping of an atomic bomb named Little Boy over Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, on August 9, a nuclear bomb called Fat Man was dropped over Nagasaki. Two hundred thousand people, according to some estimates, were killed in the attacks on the two cities and on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers.

1957's Operation Plumbbob took place at a time when the U.S. was engaged in a Cold War and nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. In 1963, the U.S. signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, underwater and outer space. A total of 928 tests took place at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1992, when the U.S. conducted its last underground nuclear test. In 1996, the U.S signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear detonations in all environments.



Sep 19, 1995:
Newspaper publishes Unabomber manifesto

The Washington Post publishes a 35,000-word manifesto written by the Unabomber, who since the late 1970s had eluded authorities while carrying out a series of bombings across the United States that killed 3 people and injured another 23. After reading the manifesto, David Kaczynski realized the writing style was similar to that of his brother, Theodore Kaczynski, and notified the F.B.I. On April 3, 1996, Ted Kaczynski was arrested at his isolated cabin near Lincoln, Montana, where investigators found evidence linking him to the Unabomber crimes.

Theodore John Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942, in Chicago. A talented math student, he entered Harvard University at age 16. In 1967, after receiving a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Kaczynski was hired as an assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley. However, he resigned abruptly in 1969 and eventually began living as a hermit in a small Montana cabin that lacked electricity and running water. Kaczynski received occasional financial support from his family.

From 1978 to 1995, the Unabomber carried out 16 bombings and mail bombings across the U.S. and became the subject of a massive F.B.I. manhunt. The F.B.I. code named him UNABOM because his targets included universities and airlines. Over the years, his victims included professors, scientists, corporate executives and a computer store owner, among others.

In June 1995, the Unabomber sent a 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto to The New York Times and Washington Post and said if it wasn't published he would continue his bombing campaign. On September 19 of that year, after discussions with the F.B.I. and Attorney General Janet Reno, the Post, in collaboration with the Times, published the manifesto, which railed against industrialized society. David Kaczynski suspected his older brother might be the Unabomber after comparing the manifesto to some documents written by Ted that David found in their mother's home.

In 1998, Kaczynski agreed to plead guilty and received four life sentences without the possibility of parole. He is serving his sentence at the supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado.



Sep 19, 1893:
New Zealand first in women's vote

With the signing of the Electoral Bill by Governor Lord Glasgow, New Zealand becomes the first country in the world to grant national voting rights to women. The bill was the outcome of years of suffragette meetings in towns and cities across the country, with women often traveling considerable distances to hear lectures and speeches, pass resolutions, and sign petitions. New Zealand women first went to the polls in the national elections of November 1893.

The United States granted women the right to vote in 1920, and Great Britain guaranteed full voting rights for women in 1928.



Sep 19, 1918:
British offensive begins in Palestine

On September 19, 1918, British forces in Palestine renew their offensive against the Turkish lines north of Jerusalem, beginning with the capture of Megiddo, the city mentioned in the Bible as the site of the Battle of Armageddon.

After leading the British forces in a successful campaign in Palestine and capturing Jerusalem in December 1917, the regional commander General Edmund Allenby lost many of his infantry troops to the Western Front when the Germans launched their massive spring offensive in 1918. Meanwhile, after a change of command—Erich von Falkenhayn was replaced by Otto Liman von Sanders—the German and Turkish forces in the region dug in, resisting several British attacks and even regaining some ground by the summer. After new units arrived from India, however, Allenby’s forces were up to full strength, and the general prepared to launch a new offensive in September.

Beginning with a midnight bombardment on September 19, the British troops in Palestine went on the attack, executing a classic feint maneuver: after directing one attack up the Jordan Valley as a diversion, Allenby switched the force of his offensive to the west and up the coast, using the aerial superiority of the Royal Air Force and the Australian Flying Corps to block the Turks from seeing the movement of his cavalry and other troops. As Allenby reported, the attack met with smashing success: "On the north our cavalry, traversing the Field of Armageddon, had occupied Nazareth, Afule, and Beisan, and were collecting the disorganized masses of enemy troops and transport as they arrived from the south. All avenues of escape open to the enemy, except the fords across the Jordan between Beisan and Jisr-ed-Dameer were thus closed." Megiddo fell with little resistance the same day, and the aerial bombing of roads, railways and troop formations in the area over the following week disrupted all Turkish and German operations. From September 20 to September 21 alone, Allenby’s troops took some 7,000 Turkish prisoners. As the demoralized Turks retreated northward and eastward, they were attacked by more Allied aircraft. General von Sanders was forced to flee Nazareth as well, still wearing his pajamas.

The British attack at Megiddo set off a string of victories that led straight through the rest of the month, including the fall of both Beirut and Damascus to British control. Barely a month later, Turkey sued for peace, signing an armistice with the Allies on October 30, 1918. Made a British viscount in October of 1919, Edmund Allenby paid tribute to his victory in Palestine, taking as his title "First Viscount Allenby of Megiddo."

[Duke of Buckingham]

Sep 21, 1780:
Benedict Arnold commits treason

On this day in 1780, during the American Revolution, American General Benedict Arnold meets with British Major John Andre to discuss handing over West Point to the British, in return for the promise of a large sum of money and a high position in the British army. The plot was foiled and Arnold, a former American hero, became synonymous with the word "traitor."

Arnold was born into a well-respected family in Norwich, Connecticut, on January 14, 1741. He apprenticed with an apothecary and was a member of the militia during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). He later became a successful trader and joined the Continental Army when the Revolutionary War broke out between Great Britain and its 13 American colonies in 1775. When the war ended in 1883, the colonies had won their independence from Britain and formed a new nation, the United States.

During the war, Benedict Arnold proved himself a brave and skillful leader, helping Ethan Allen's troops capture Fort Ticonderoga in 1775 and then participating in the unsuccessful attack on British Quebec later that year, which earned him a promotion to brigadier general. Arnold distinguished himself in campaigns at Lake Champlain, Ridgefield and Saratoga, and gained the support of George Washington. However, Arnold had enemies within the military and in 1777, five men of lesser rank were promoted over him. Over the course of the next few years, Arnold married for a second time and he and his new wife lived a lavish lifestyle in Philadelphia, accumulating substantial debt. The debt and the resentment Arnold felt over not being promoted faster were motivating factors in his choice to become a turncoat.

In 1780, Arnold was given command of West Point, an American fort on the Hudson River in New York (and future home of the U.S. military academy, established in 1802). Arnold contacted Sir Henry Clinton, head of the British forces, and proposed handing over West Point and his men. On September 21 of that year, Arnold met with Major John Andre and made his traitorous pact. However, the conspiracy was uncovered and Andre was captured and executed. Arnold, the former American patriot, fled to the enemy side and went on to lead British troops in Virginia and Connecticut. He later moved to England, though he never received all of what he'd been promised by the British. He died in London on June 14, 1801.



Sep 21, 1938:
The Great New England Hurricane

Without warning, a powerful Category 3 hurricane slams into Long Island and southern New England, causing 600 deaths and devastating coastal cities and towns. Also called the Long Island Express, the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 was the most destructive storm to strike the region in the 20th century.

The officially unnamed hurricane was born out a tropical cyclone that developed in the eastern Atlantic on September 10, 1938, near the Cape Verde Islands. Six days later, the captain of a Brazilian freighter sighted the storm northeast of Puerto Rico and radioed a warning to the U.S. Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service). It was expected that the storm would make landfall in south Florida, and hurricane-experienced coastal citizens stocked up on supplies and boarded up their homes. On September 19, however, the storm suddenly changed direction and began moving north, parallel to the eastern seaboard.

Charlie Pierce, a junior forecaster in the U.S. Weather Bureau, was sure that the hurricane was heading for the Northeast, but the chief forecaster overruled him. It had been well over a century since New England had been hit by a substantial hurricane, and few believed it could happen again. Hurricanes rarely persist after encountering the cold waters of the North Atlantic. However, this hurricane was moving north at an unusually rapid pace--more than 60 mph--and was following a track over the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.

With Europe on the brink of war over the worsening Sudetenland crisis, little media attention was given to the powerful hurricane at sea. There was no advanced meteorological technology, such as radar, radio buoys, or satellite imagery, to warn of the hurricane's approach. By the time the U.S. Weather Bureau learned that the Category 3 storm was on a collision course with Long Island on the afternoon of September 21, it was too late for a warning.

Along the south shore of Long Island, the sky began to darken and the wind picked up. Fishermen and boaters were at sea, and summer residents enjoying the end of the season were in their beachfront homes. Around 2:30 p.m., the full force of the hurricane made landfall, unfortunately around high tide. Surges of ocean water and waves 40 feet tall swallowed up coastal homes. At Westhampton, which lay directly in the path of the storm, 150 beach homes were destroyed, about a third of which were pulled into the swelling ocean. Winds exceeded 100 mph. Inland, people were drowned in flooding, killed by uprooted trees and falling debris, and electrocuted by downed electrical lines.

At 4 p.m., the center of the hurricane crossed the Long Island Sound and reached Connecticut. Rivers swollen by a week of steady rain spilled over and washed away roadways. In New London, a short circuit in a flooded building started a fire that was fanned by the 100 mph winds into an inferno. Much of the business district was consumed.

The hurricane gained intensity as it passed into Rhode Island. Winds in excess of 120 mph caused a storm surge of 12 to 15 feet in Narragansett Bay, destroying coastal homes and entire fleets of boats at yacht clubs and marinas. The waters of the bay surged into Providence harbor around 5 p.m., rapidly submerging the downtown area of Rhode Island's capital under more than 13 feet of water. Many people were swept away.

The hurricane then raced northward across Massachusetts, gaining speed again and causing great flooding. In Milton, south of Boston, the Blue Hill Observatory recorded one of the highest wind gusts in history, an astounding 186 mph. Boston was hit hard, and "Old Ironsides"--the historic ship U.S.S. Constitution--was torn from its moorings in Boston Navy Yard and suffered slight damage. Hundreds of other ships were not so lucky.

The hurricane lost intensity as it passed over northern New England, but by the time the storm reached Canada around 11 p.m. it was still powerful enough to cause widespread damage. The Great New England Hurricane finally dissipated over Canada that night.

All told, 700 people were killed by the hurricane, 600 of them in Long Island and southern New England. Some 700 people were injured. Nearly 9,000 homes and buildings were destroyed, and 15,000 damaged. Nearly 3,000 ships were sunk or wrecked. Power lines were downed across the region, causing widespread blackouts. Innumerable trees were felled, and 12 new inlets were created on Long Island. Railroads were destroyed and farms were obliterated. Total damages were $306 million, which equals $18 billion in today's dollars.



Sep 21, 1968:
Jeannie C. Riley is the first woman to top the Country and Pop charts simultaneously

When the singer Jeannie C. Riley said the word "men," it came out sounding like "min." And when she said "eyes," it came out sounding like "Ahhs." In New York or Los Angeles, her deep-in-the-heart-of-Texas accent might have been as big an impediment as Eliza Doolittle's Cockney lilt in London society, but in Nashville, Tennessee, the capital of country music, it was her ticket to pop immortality. With her career-defining hit song, 23-year-old Jeannie C. Riley accomplished a crossover feat that no other woman would match for another dozen years: On September 21, 1968, she became the first female performer to top the Billboard Country and Pop charts simultaneously, with "Harper Valley P.T.A."

Perhaps never in pop history has one voice been more right for one song than Jeannie C. Riley's was for "Harper Valley P.T.A." Indeed, it was her speaking voice, and not her singing, that got Riley noticed and picked out for the song. She had come to Nashville from her native Anson, Texas, in her early 20s to pursue a singing career, but it was on her day job as a receptionist at that she was noticed by the legendary country-music record producer Shelby Singleton. Recognizing her voice as perfect for the protagonist in songwriter Tom T. Hall's crypto-feminist tale of a small-town Southern widow's fight for her right to wear her skirts short and her heels high, Singleton had Riley record "Harper Valley P.T.A." as her first professional demo, which was released as a single that charged up the Pop and Country charts in mid-summer 1968.

But as big a hit as "Harper Valley P.T.A." was for the aspiring star plucked from obscurity to record it, rarely in pop history has a star grown to be as uncomfortable with her signature hit as Riley did with hers. Many fans wanted to believe that Jeannie C. Riley really was the Hester Prynne-meets-Daisy Duke protagonist of "Harper Valley P.T.A.," and for a time at least, she was willing to indulge the misconception and dress the part. Eventually, though, Riley sided rather publicly with the conservative values "Harper Valley P.T.A." derided by becoming a born-again Christian and refusing to perform her biggest career hit.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Sep 23, 1933:
Standard Oil geologists arrive in Saudi Arabia

On September 23, 1933, a party of American geologists lands at the Persian Gulf port of Jubail in Saudi Arabia and begins its journey into the desert. That July, with the discovery of a massive oil field at Ghawar, Saudi King Abdel Aziz had granted the Standard Oil Company of California a concession to "explore and search for and drill and extract and manufacture and transport" petroleum and "kindred bituminous matter" in the country's vast Eastern Province; in turn, Standard Oil immediately dispatched the team of scientists to locate the most profitable spot for the company to begin its drilling.

As automobiles and other internal-combustion machines proliferated, both in the United States and around the globe, Standard Oil was eager to control as much of the market for gasoline as it could. As a result, it would do almost anything to have first dibs on Saudi oil. The partnership between Abdel Aziz's government and Standard Oil became known as the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). (Texaco soon joined the partnership; about a decade later, so did Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socony-Vacuum Oil.) The company promised to provide the Saudi government with a steady income, along with an outright payment of 50,0000 British pounds; in return, Aramco got exclusive rights to all the oil underneath the eastern desert. In 1938, the company's gamble (after all, while Aramco engineers knew there was oil in the region, no one knew exactly where or how much) paid off: its geologists and drillers discovered oil in "commercial quantities" at the Dammam Dome, near Dhahran. The next year, Aramco exported its first tanker-load of petroleum.

In 1950, once it had become clear how very much oil there was under that desert, Aramco agreed to split its profits with the Saudi government. In 1980, after several years of squabbling over the price and availability of the country's petroleum (Saudi Arabia was a founding member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, whose 1973 embargo precipitated a massive fuel crisis in the United States and other parts of the industrial world), Saudis won total control of the company: It's now known as Saudi Aramco. The next year, the kingdom's oil revenues reached $118 billion.



Sep 23, 1949:
Truman announces Soviets have exploded a nuclear device

In a surprisingly low-key and carefully worded statement, President Harry S. Truman informs the American people that the Soviets have exploded a nuclear bomb. The Soviet accomplishment, years ahead of what was thought possible by most U.S. officials, caused a panic in the American government.

What had not been taken into account by the U.S. government was the fact that the Soviets, like the Americans, had captured many German scientists after World War II who had been working on nuclear development. In addition, the United States was unaware of the scope of Soviet spy efforts to gain valuable information. Years ahead of what Americans thought possible, the Soviets had exploded a nuclear device. Truman reacted by requesting an intensive re-evaluation of America's Cold War policies by the National Security Council. The report, issued to the president in early 1950, called for massive increases in military spending and a dramatic acceleration in the program to develop the next stage of nuclear weaponry—the hydrogen bomb.



Sep 23, 1806:
Lewis and Clark return

Amid much public excitement, American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark return to St. Louis, Missouri, from the first recorded overland journey from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast and back. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had set off more than two years before to explore the territory of the Louisiana Purchase.

Even before the U.S. government concluded purchase negotiations with France, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned his private secretary Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, an army captain, to lead an expedition into what is now the U.S. Northwest. On May 14, the "Corps of Discovery," featuring 28 men and one woman—a Native American named Sacagawea—left St. Louis for the American interior.

The expedition traveled up the Missouri River in six canoes and two longboats and wintered in Dakota before crossing into Montana, where they first saw the Rocky Mountains. On the other side of the Continental Divide, they were met by Sacagawea's tribe, the Shoshone Indians, who sold them horses for their journey down through the Bitterroot Mountains. After passing through the dangerous rapids of the Clearwater and Snake rivers in canoes, the explorers reached the calm of the Columbia River, which led them to the sea. On November 8, 1805, the expedition arrived at the Pacific Ocean, the first European explorers to do so by an overland route from the east. After pausing there for winter, the explorers began their long journey back to St. Louis.

On September 23, 1806, after two and a half years, the expedition returned to the city, bringing back a wealth of information about the largely unexplored region, as well as valuable U.S. claims to Oregon Territory.



Sep 23, 1846:
Eighth planet discovered

German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle discovers the planet Neptune at the Berlin Observatory.

Neptune, generally the eighth planet from the sun, was postulated by the French astronomer Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, who calculated the approximate location of the planet by studying gravity-induced disturbances in the motions of Uranus. On September 23, 1846, Le Verrier informed Galle of his findings, and the same night Galle and his assistant Heinrich Louis d'Arrest identified Neptune at their observatory in Berlin. Noting its movement relative to background stars over 24 hours confirmed that it was a planet.

The blue gas giant, which has a diameter four times that of Earth, was named for the Roman god of the sea. It has eight known moons, of which Triton is the largest, and a ring system containing three bright and two dim rings. It completes an orbit of the sun once every 165 years. In 1989, the U.S. planetary spacecraft Voyager 2 was the first human spacecraft to visit Neptune.



Sep 23, 1972:
Mac Davis earns one of the 1970s' most head-scratching #1 hits with "Baby Don't Get Hooked on Me"

On this day in 1972, "Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me" by singer-songwriter Mac Davis reached the top of the American pop charts. In a year that not only saw Congress pass the Equal Rights Amendment, but also saw Helen Reddy score a #1 hit with her feminist anthem "I Am Woman," "Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me" stands in rather stark contrast as one of the more blithely chauvinistic pop hits of all time.

Early in his career, Scott "Mac" Davis was best known within the music industry as a professional songwriter who scored a quartet of late-career hits for Elvis Presley—"A Little Less Conversation" (1968), "Memories" (1969), "In The Ghetto" (1969) and "Don’t Cry Daddy" (1969)—and another for Bobby Goldsboro—"Watching Scotty Grow" (1971). With "Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me," Davis would score his first hit as a performer.

"Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me" was sung from the perspective of a young man reluctant to allow a romantic fling to turn into a committed relationship, despite a certain undeniable fondness for his paramour. "You’re a hot-blooded woman-child," he sings, "and it’s warm where you’re touchin’ me." But after dispensing with such pleasantries, the protagonist proceeds to explain, "Baby, baby, don’t get hooked on me/’Cause I’ll just use you and I’ll set you free."

Despite lyrics likely to be deemed chauvinistic by 21st-century standards, "Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me" found ready acceptance in 1972 and launched Mac Davis on a decade-long run in the pop-cultural spotlight. And in contrast to the apparent callousness of "Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me," Mac Davis proved during that run to be one of the most charming and likable characters in the pop-cultural landscape, not only hosting his own short-lived TV variety show, but also making numerous appearances as an actor on television and in movies. And if the song that made him a star hasn’t aged all that well, his signature tune, "I Believe In Music" and his humorously self-deprecating country hit "It’s Hard To Be Humble" certainly have.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Sep 24, 1789:
The First Supreme Court

The Judiciary Act of 1789 is passed by Congress and signed by President George Washington, establishing the Supreme Court of the United States as a tribunal made up of six justices who were to serve on the court until death or retirement. That day, President Washington nominated John Jay to preside as chief justice, and John Rutledge, William Cushing, John Blair, Robert Harrison, and James Wilson to be associate justices. On September 26, all six appointments were confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

The U.S. Supreme Court was established by Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution granted the Supreme Court ultimate jurisdiction over all laws, especially those in which their constitutionality was at issue. The high court was also designated to oversee cases concerning treaties of the United States, foreign diplomats, admiralty practice, and maritime jurisdiction. On February 1, 1790, the first session of the U.S. Supreme Court was held in New York City's Royal Exchange Building.

The U.S. Supreme Court grew into the most important judicial body in the world in terms of its central place in the American political order. According to the Constitution, the size of the court is set by Congress, and the number of justices varied during the 19th century before stabilizing in 1869 at nine. In times of constitutional crisis, the nation's highest court has always played a definitive role in resolving, for better or worse, the great issues of the time.



Sep 24, 1953:
United States will not "cringe" before Soviet weapons

In a speech that is by turns confrontational and sarcastic, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declares that the United States will not "cringe or become panicky" in the face of Soviet nuclear weapons. Dulles' speech indicated that although the Korean War had finally reached a peaceful conclusion, the United States would continue its policy of containing communist expansion, by force if necessary.

Secretary Dulles began his speech to the American Federation of Labor by observing that he believed world peace was within reach, but was threatened by "communist leaders who openly repudiate the restraints of moral law." The United States, he declared, "does not believe that salvation can be won merely by making concessions which enhance the power and increase the arrogance of those who have already extended their rule over one-third of the human race." Acknowledging that the Soviets now possessed a nuclear arsenal, Dulles countered that the United States would not "cringe or became panicky." Turning to the issue of labor, Dulles then spoke at length about what he called the communist "swindle." The secretary spoke derisively of the "hoax" played on Russian workers by their own government. "The Russian worker," Dulles stated, "is the most underpaid, overworked person in any modern industrial state. He is the most managed, checked, spied on, and unrepresented worker in the world today."

Dulles' speech indicated that although the new administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower had recently finished negotiating a cease-fire in Korea, the United States was not backing off from its stated Cold War commitment to containing communism. The speech also hinted at two points that would become mainstays of the Secretary's Cold War diplomacy. First was the idea that the United States would not back down from the Soviets simply because of the threat of nuclear war. This idea eventually became known as "brinkmanship"—the notion that the Soviets, if pushed to the "brink" of nuclear war, would eventually back down. Second was Dulles' frequently repeated assertion that the people living in communist nations were essentially "captives" of repressive communist regimes. In the years to come, Dulles would expand on both ideas in more detail.



Sep 24, 1971:
A game warden is reported missing

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 had been buried in a shallow grave, and his severed head, which had two bullet wounds, revealed that he had been shot with a .22 shotgun.

Detectives immediately began investigating anyone who had a motive to kill the warden. Because LaFeve was known for harshly confronting poachers, everyone that had been arrested by him at the wildlife area was questioned. Those without solid alibis were asked to take a polygraph test. While this process took a long time and those involved grumbled, only Brian Hussong refused to take the test.

LaFeve had arrested Hussong several times for poaching, most recently for shooting pheasants illegally. After investigators received a court order enabling them to wiretap Hussong's phone, a call to his grandmother, Agnes Hussong, broke open the case. Police heard Agnes say that Brian's guns were well hidden. When they searched her home, she showed them the .22 rifle that was later proven to be the murder weapon.

At Hussong's trial, his grandmother denied both the phone conversation and the encounter with the police, but the Michigan Voice Identification Unit verified that the voice on the wiretap tapes was indeed hers. After the impeachment of his grandmother's testimony, Hussong did not stand much of a chance: He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1972.


Sep 24, 1966:
"Last Train To Clarksville" gives the made-for-TV Monkees a real-life pop hit

When producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson conceived a situation comedy called The Monkees in 1965, they hoped to create a ratings success by blurring the line between pop music and television. Instead, they succeeded in obliterating that line entirely when the pop group that began as a wholly fictional creation went on to rival, however briefly, the success of its real-life inspiration, the Beatles. On this day in 1966, the made-for-television Monkees knocked down the fourth wall decisively when their first single, "Last Train To Clarksville" entered the Billboard Top 40.

"Last Train To Clarksville" was written by the team that was also responsible for the theme song of The Monkees, songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. Though Boyce and Hart had been working together in Los Angeles for several years before being asked to write and record the soundtrack for Schneider and Rafelson's A Hard Day's Night-inspired pilot, their biggest success to date had been in writing minor hits for Chubby Checker and Paul Revere and the Raiders and in being commissioned to write the theme song for Days Of Our Lives. Their association with The Monkees would end up launching Boyce and Hart on a moderately successful career as performers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By far their best-known hits, however, were the ones they wrote for the Monkees, including "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" and "Last Train To Clarksville."

Just as producers Schneider and Rafelson had reached out to a pair of industry professionals to create the music for the pilot episode of The Monkees, they engaged numerous others to create the other memorable songs in the Monkees' catalog. Under the musical direction of Don Kirshner, The Monkees featured hits by some of the era's greatest songwriters, including Neil Diamond, who wrote "I'm A Believer" and "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" (both 1967) and the great husband-and-wife team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who wrote "Daydream Believer" (1967). Numerous other Monkees songs were written by such songwriting luminaries as Cynthia Mann and Barry Weill, Harry Nilsson and Carole Bayer Sager and Neil Sedaka.

By the time their third album was released, the real-life Monkees—Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, Mickey Dolenz and Peter Tork—had taken over creative control of their musical output, including taking on much of the songwriting. Although they would release seven more studio albums, none would contain hits as successful or memorable as the one that gave the group its breakthrough on September 24, 1966.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Sep 25, 1959:
Eisenhower and Khrushchev meet for talks

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev caps his trip to the United States with two days of meetings with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The two men came to general agreement on a number of issues, but a U-2 spy plane incident in May 1960 crushed any hopes for further improvement of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Eisenhower years.

Khrushchev arrived in the United States on September 15, 1959, for an extended visit and summit with Eisenhower. The first days of the Russian's visit were a mixture of pomp, tourism, and a few moments of tension. While visiting Los Angeles, Khrushchev became infuriated by comments by the head of Twentieth Century Fox Studio and then threw a tantrum when he was barred from visiting Disneyland because of security concerns. On September 25, however, the real business part of Khrushchev's trip began as he and President Eisenhower met at Camp David in Maryland to begin two days of talks about the Cold War. Eisenhower indicated that he was going into the talks with high hopes, but also warned that progress would only come if the Soviets were willing to make concessions on several issues, notably Germany and Berlin. Khrushchev and his entourage also seemed optimistic about the talks.

After two days of meetings, the two leaders issued a joint communique. It suggested that both "agreed that these discussions have been useful in clarifying each other's position on a number of subjects." They hoped "their exchanges of views will contribute to a better understanding of the motives and position of each, and thus to the achievement of a just and lasting peace." In particular, they believed that "the question of general disarmament is the most important one facing the world today." There were no specific agreements or treaties, but both nations did resolve to reopen talks about Berlin and other issues related to cultural exchanges and trade. Eisenhower and Khrushchev also agreed to hold another summit in the near future and the president announced that he would visit the Soviet Union sometime in the next year.

Unfortunately, the hopeful optimism generated by the September 1959 meeting did not last long. In May 1960, the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Russia and captured the pilot. The Eisenhower administration compounded the situation by initially disclaiming any knowledge of espionage flights over the Soviet Union. A summit meeting scheduled for Geneva was scrapped, as were plans for Eisenhower to visit to the Soviet Union.



Sep 25, 1978:
Mid-air collision kills 153

A Pacific Southwest Airlines jet collides in mid-air with a small Cessna over San Diego, killing 153 people on this day in 1978. The wreckage of the planes fell into a populous neighborhood and did extensive damage on the ground.

David Lee Boswell and his instructor, Martin Kazy, were in the process of a flying lesson in a single-engine Cessna 1732 on the morning of September 25, practicing approaches at San Diego's Lindbergh Field airport. After two successful passes, Boswell aimed the Cessna toward the Montgomery Field airport northeast of San Diego.

At the same time, Pacific Southwest Flight 182 was approaching San Diego. The jet, a Boeing 727, was carrying 144 passengers and crew members from Sacramento, after a stopover in Los Angeles. Though air-traffic controllers at Lindbergh had told Boswell to keep the Cessna below 3,500 feet altitude as it flew northeast, the Cessna did not comply and changed course without informing the controllers.

The pilots of Flight 182 could see the Cessna clearly at 9 a.m., but soon lost sight of it and failed to inform the controllers. Meanwhile, the conflict-alert warning system began to flash at the air-traffic control center. However, because the alert system went off so frequently with false alarms, it was ignored. The controllers believed that the pilots of the 727 had the Cessna in view. Within a minute, the planes collided.

The fuel in the 727 burst into a massive fireball upon impact. A witness on the ground reported that she saw her "apples and oranges bake on the trees." The planes nose-dived straight into San Diego's North Park neighborhood, destroying 22 homes and killing seven people on the ground. All 144 people on the 727 were killed, as well as both of the Cessna's pilots.



Sep 25, 1970:
The Partridge Family premieres on ABC television

Unwilling to rest as a one-hit wonder when its first big hit, The Monkees, went off the air in 1968, the television production company Screen Gems wasted no time in trying to repeat its success. On this day in 1970, in the 8:30 p.m. time slot immediately following The Brady Bunch, ABC premiered a program that would give Screen Gems its second TV-to-pop-chart smash: The Partridge Family.

If the Beatles served as the inspiration for The Monkees, it was the real-life family act the Cowsills that inspired Screen Gems to dream up The Partridge Family. Originally made up of four teenage brothers (Bill, Bob, Barry and John), the Cowsills scored their first top-40 hit with "The Rain, The Park & Other Things" (1967) after adding their mother to the lineup. They earned three more hits in 1968 with "We Can Fly," "Indian Lake" and "Hair" after adding two additional younger siblings, and it was in this configuration that they caught the eyes of the folks at Screen Gems. In fact, Screen Gems approached the Cowsill family about having the children star in the show that would eventually become The Partridge Family, but the family demurred when it learned that actress Shirley Jones, and not Barbara Cowsill, would be playing the role of Shirley Partridge. Undaunted, Screen Gems hired four non-singing child actors for the roles of Laurie, Danny, Chris and Tracy Partridge and one future teen idol, David Cassidy, for the role of Keith.

In the pilot episode of The Partridge Family, the five children of a widowed single mother convince their mom to join them in their garage recording sessions and then watch their first record, "I Think I Love You" become a #1 pop hit. In a case not so much of life imitating art as of a brilliant marketing machine replicating its earlier success, the song "I Think I Love You" raced to the top of the real-life pop charts less than two months after its television debut.

However, hits like "I Think I Love You" and "I Woke Up in Love This Morning" were not actually recorded by a five siblings and their mom in a garage. The Partridge Family's hits were recorded by some of the best professional musicians working in Los Angeles at the time, including drummer Hal Blaine and the other studio musicians known as the Wrecking Crew. The Partridge Family did, however, launch David Cassidy on a short-lived career as an actual pop singer, and it also, according to news reports, inspired some misguided runaways to show up on Shirley Jones' Beverly Hills lawn in the hopes that she might adopt them into her television family.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Sep 26, 1989:
Anti-censorship law approved by Soviet legislature


In one of the most heartening indications that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's promise of political openness in Russia was becoming a reality, committees in the Soviet legislature pass a bill allowing the publication of books, newspapers, and magazines without government approval. The law was a break with the Soviet past, in which government censorship of the press was a fact of life.

Throughout the post-World War II period, censorship in the Soviet Union grew even stronger than during the pre-war years. Under the cloak of "protecting" the Russian citizenry from "decadent" Western ideas and "reactionary" ideologies, the Soviet government routinely censored the press. Newspapers were merely organs of the Soviet Communist Party. Books and magazine articles had to be approved prior to publication. Authors like Boris Pasternak, whose novel Dr. Zhivago was banned in 1956, found it impossible to publish in the Soviet Union. Censorship also extended to the arts and music.

In 1985, however, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Russia, promising what he called "glasnost"--a freer political atmosphere in the Soviet Union. In the following years, he freed political prisoners and even permitted Pasternak to be posthumously readmitted to the Soviet writers' union. In September 1989, a particularly important step was taken to restrict the government's power of censorship. Important committees in the Soviet legislature approved a new law to which Gorbachev soon gave his own approval. It permitted Soviet citizens to publish books, newspapers, and magazines without prior government approval. Some restrictions still existed--all publishers had to register with the government, and their publications could be suspended if they were judged to "promote war or racism, advocate ethnic or religious intolerance, or appeal for the violent overthrow or change of the existing state and public order."

Despite the restrictions, the 1989 law was evidence that Gorbachev was intent on making good his promise to open up the Soviet political system. Soviet journalists and writers celebrated the act, but Gorbachev's reforms to the Soviet system may have been too little, too late. In a little more than two years, economic and political turmoil in the Soviet Union destroyed his power base. In December 1991, he resigned as president and the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a nation.


Sep 26, 1957:
Bernstein's West Side Story opens


On September 26, 1957, West Side Story, composed by Leonard Bernstein, opens at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. For the groundbreaking musical, Bernstein provided a propulsive and rhapsodic score that many celebrate as his greatest achievement as a composer. However, even without the triumph of West Side Story, Bernstein's place in musical history was firmly established. In addition to his work as a composer, the "Renaissance man of music" excelled as a conductor, a concert pianist, and a teacher who brought classical music to the masses.

Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Russian-Jewish immigrants in 1918, Bernstein began piano lessons at his own insistence when he was 10. He immediately demonstrated an instinctive talent for music and by age 12 was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. He studied piano and composition at Harvard but was encouraged by the American composer Aaron Copland and others to become a conductor after they observed Bernstein's intuitive grasp of classical music and his unusual ability to play complex orchestral scores on the piano.

He studied conducting with Fritz Reiner and Serge Koussevitzky and in 1943 was hired as an assistant conductor for the New York Philharmonic. In the history of the orchestra, no assistant had been called on to conduct, but on November 14 fate smiled on Bernstein when guest conductor Bruno Walter fell ill. The night before, Bernstein had heard a singer perform one of his compositions and then, in typical Bernstein fashion, had stayed up late drinking and playing piano at the post-recital party. With three hours of sleep, a hangover, and no rehearsal, Bernstein was asked to conduct a complex program of Schumann, Strauss, Rosza, and Wagner that was going to broadcast from Carnegie Hall across the nation by CBS radio. The concert was a sensational success, and The New York Times published a front-page article the next day announcing the arrival of a great new conducting talent.

For the rest of his life, Bernstein was an internationally sought-after conductor. He toured the world many times over and in 1953 became the first American to conduct at La Scala in Milan, Italy's foremost opera house. He had an animated and flamboyant style, and on more than one occasion Bernstein actually fell off his conducting podium in his enthusiasm. A respected classical pianist, he sometimes conducted from the piano stool. Charismatic and good looking, Bernstein was a popular idol known to people who never listened to classical music.

Refusing to restrict himself to conducting, he composed acclaimed symphonies, operas, and scores for ballets. He was also deeply interested in American popular music, and jazz influences can be found in many of his classical pieces. His best-known works were for Broadway, and the musicals he composed include On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953), Candide (1956), and West Side Story (1957).

For West Side Story, a reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet transposed onto New York's West Side, Bernstein worked with the brilliant choreographer Jerome Robbins and the lyricist Stephen Sondheim. West Side Story tells the tale of a love affair between Tony, who is Polish American, and Maria, a Puerto Rican, set against an urban background of interracial warfare. With its gritty story and volatile dance sequences, West Side Story was the antithesis of traditional American musicals. Bernstein's exhilarating, semi-operatic score runs throughout the play and keeps the tension and emotion high.

When it opened on September 26, 1957, West Side Story received a mixed critical response. Debuting one day after the forced integration of Central High School in Little Rock, the musical's story of racial conflict was discomfiting to some. West Side Story won just two Tony Awards, for choreography and set design, but made an impressive maiden run of 732 performances. In 1961, a film version starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer was an enormous hit, and took home 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The stage version of West Side Story was soon revived, and the musical is still performed today.

Leonard Bernstein was also a talented educator who taught America about classical music with the television programs Omnibus and Young People's Concerts. In 1973, he was invited to Harvard to lecture on linguistics and music. He died in 1990 at the age of 72.



Sep 26, 1820:
The famous frontiersman Daniel Boone dies in Missouri


On this day in 1820 the great pioneering frontiersman Daniel Boone dies quietly in his sleep at his son's home near present-day Defiance, Missouri. The indefatigable voyager was 86.

Boone was born in 1734 to Quaker parents living in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Following a squabble with the Pennsylvania Quakers, Boone's family decided to head south and west for less crowded regions, and they eventually settled in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There the young Daniel Boone began his life-long love for wilderness, spending long days exploring the still relatively unspoiled forests and mountains of the region. An indifferent student who never learned to write more than a crude sentence or two, Boone's passion was for the outdoors, and he quickly became a superb marksman, hunter and woodsman.

Never satisfied to stay put for very long, Boone soon began making ever longer and more ambitious journeys into the relatively unexplored lands to the west. In May of 1769, Boone and five companions crossed over the Cumberland Gap and explored along the south fork of the Kentucky River. Impressed by the fertility and relative emptiness of the land--although the native inhabitants hardly considered it to be empty--Boone returned in 1773 with his family, hoping to establish a permanent settlement. An Indian attack prevented that first attempt from succeeding, but Boone returned two years later to open the route that became known as Boone's Trace (or the Wilderness Road) between the Cumberland Gap and a new settlement along the Kentucky River called Fortress Boonesboro. After years of struggles against both Native Americans and British soldiers, Boonesboro eventually became one of the most important gateways for the early American settlement of the Trans-Appalachian West.

Made a legend in his own time by John Filson's "Boone Autobiography" and Lord Byron's depiction of him as the quintessential frontiersman in the book Don Juan, Boone became a symbol of the western pioneering spirit for many Americans. Ironically, though, Boone's fame and his success in opening the Trans-Appalachian West to large-scale settlement later came to haunt him. Having lost his Kentucky land holdings by failing to properly register them, Boone moved even further west in 1799, trying to escape the civilized regions he had been so instrumental in creating. Finally settling in Missouri--though he never stopped dreaming of continuing westward--he lived out the rest of his life doing what he loved best: hunting and trapping in a fertile wild land still largely untouched by the Anglo pioneers who had followed the path he blazed to the West.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Sep 30, 1949:
Berlin Airlift ends

After 15 months and more than 250,000 flights, the Berlin Airlift officially comes to an end. The airlift was one of the greatest logistical feats in modern history and was one of the crucial events of the early Cold War.

In June 1948, the Soviet Union suddenly blocked all ground traffic into West Berlin, which was located entirely within the Russian zone of occupation in Germany. It was an obvious effort to force the United States, Great Britain, and France (the other occupying powers in Germany) to accept Soviet demands concerning the postwar fate of Germany. As a result of the Soviet blockade, the people of West Berlin were left without food, clothing, or medical supplies. Some U.S. officials pushed for an aggressive response to the Soviet provocation, but cooler heads prevailed and a plan for an airlift of supplies to West Berlin was developed. It was a daunting task: supplying the daily wants and needs of so many civilians would require tons of food and other goods each and every day. On June 26, 1948, the Berlin Airlift began with U.S. pilots and planes carrying the lion's share of the burden. During the next 15 months, 277,264 aircraft landed in West Berlin bringing over 2 million tons of supplies. On September 30, 1949, the last plane--an American C-54--landed in Berlin and unloaded over two tons of coal. Even though the Soviet blockade officially ended in May 1949, it took several more months for the West Berlin economy to recover and the necessary stockpiles of food, medicine, and fuel to be replenished.

The Berlin Airlift was a tremendous Cold War victory for the United States. Without firing a shot, the Americans foiled the Soviet plan to hold West Berlin hostage, while simultaneously demonstrating to the world the "Yankee ingenuity" for which their nation was famous. For the Soviets, the Berlin crisis was an unmitigated disaster. The United States, France, and Great Britain merely hardened their resolve on issues related to Germany, and the world came to see the Russians as international bullies, trying to starve innocent citizens.



Sep 30, 1999:
Radiation released at Japanese plant

Large doses of radiation are released at Japan's Tokaimura nuclear plant on this day in 1999. It was Japan's worst nuclear accident, caused by a serious error made by workers at the plant. One person was killed, 49 were injured and thousands of others were forcibly confined to their homes for several days.

The Tokaimura nuclear plant is located 87 miles northwest of Tokyo and supplies power to much of the surrounding region. On September 30, workers were mixing liquid uranium when they made a serious, and inexplicable, mistake. Instead of pouring five pounds of powdered uranium into nitric acid, the workers poured 35 pounds, seven times too much. The resulting chain reaction caused gamma rays and stray neutrons to flood the purification chamber, where the radioactive water was treated. One employee immediately collapsed and the others fled the scene.

The emergency team at the plant were forced to seek outside assistance, as they could not contain the reaction themselves. As a precaution, trains and roads leading to and from the area were blocked. However, the plant workers forgot to turn off the plant's ventilation system and radiation was inadvertently sent into the air, reaching nearby towns. The Tokyo Electric Power Company brought in 900 pounds of sodium borate to absorb the radiation, but they could not safely get close enough to the source to deploy it properly. Eventually, many hours later, they figured out how to get the sodium borate into hoses so that it could be sprayed onto the source of the radiation. By that time, it was too late to save everyone.

Hisashi Ouchi, a plant worker, died after spending two weeks in a coma. Forty-nine others were exposed to enough radiation to make them seriously ill. Further, 33,000 people living near the plant had to be quarantined for several days. Tomi Oshiro, an area resident, said "I am furious. It took place right next to people's houses, and it still took a long time before people were warned or any emergency measures were taken." Radioactive iodine-131 lingered in the air for a week.



Sep 30, 1954:
USS Nautilus commissioned

The USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear submarine, is commissioned by the U.S. Navy.

The Nautilus was constructed under the direction of U.S. Navy Captain Hyman G. Rickover, a brilliant Russian-born engineer who joined the U.S. atomic program in 1946. In 1947, he was put in charge of the navy's nuclear-propulsion program and began work on an atomic submarine. Regarded as a fanatic by his detractors, Rickover succeeded in developing and delivering the world's first nuclear submarine years ahead of schedule. In 1952, the Nautilus' keel was laid by President Harry S. Truman, and on January 21, 1954, first lady Mamie Eisenhower broke a bottle of champagne across its bow as it was launched into the Thames River at Groton, Connecticut. Commissioned on September 30, 1954, it first ran under nuclear power on the morning of January 17, 1955.

Much larger than the diesel-electric submarines that preceded it, the Nautilus stretched 319 feet and displaced 3,180 tons. It could remain submerged for almost unlimited periods because its atomic engine needed no air and only a very small quantity of nuclear fuel. The uranium-powered nuclear reactor produced steam that drove propulsion turbines, allowing the Nautilus to travel underwater at speeds in excess of 20 knots.

In its early years of service, the USS Nautilus broke numerous submarine travel records and in August 1958 accomplished the first voyage under the geographic North Pole. After a career spanning 25 years and almost 500,000 miles steamed, the Nautilus was decommissioned on March 3, 1980. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982, the world's first nuclear submarine went on exhibit in 1986 as the Historic Ship Nautilus at the Submarine Force Museum in Groton, Connecticut.



Sep 30, 1935:
Johnny Mathis is born

Stars like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were established enough to survive the rock-and-roll revolution, but the arrival of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry et al., in the late-1950s did no favors for most of the artists who occupied the top of the pre-rock-and-roll pop charts. Names like Perez Prado, Gogi Grant and Guy Mitchell, for instance, have been largely lost to history, though one young newcomer working in a style far more "square" than that of his contemporaries managed to survive and even thrive. Born on this day in 1935, Johnny Mathis went on to become one of the most successful recording artists of all time.

Mathis was born in Gilmer, Texas, and raised in San Francisco the fourth of seven children. He showed an aptitude for music very early on, and he began his formal, classical voice training at the age of just 13. As promising as his future in music seemed to be, however, there was real question during his teens as to whether he should devote himself to sports instead. As a four-letter athlete at George Washington High School, Mathis broke a high-jump record previously held by NBA legend Bill Russell, and while a student at San Francisco State University, he was invited to the U.S. trials in track and field for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. With his father's guidance, however, Mathis chose to dedicate himself to what was beginning to look like a very real chance of success as a musician.

While doing weekend gigs in various San Francisco nightclubs the previous year, Mathis came to the attention of George Avakian, head of jazz A&R for Columbia Records. As the widely circulated legend has it, after hearing Johnny Mathis for the very first time, Avakian wired a telegram to Columbia headquarters reading, "Have found phenomenal 19-year-old boy who could go all the way. Send blank contracts." After Johnny passed on his chance at making the Olympic team, he headed to New York to record his debut album.

While that first album had little impact, Mathis's next recordings, under the supervision of Columbia's Mitch Miller, established him as a star. The singles "Wonderful, Wonderful" and "It's Not For Me To Say" sailed up the pop charts in the summer of 1957, quickly followed that same year by the hits "Chances Are," "Twelfth Of Never" and, in the next five years, by 13 more top-40 hits, including "A Certain Smile" (1958), "Misty" (1959) and "Gina" (1962). So popular during the dawn of rock and roll was the smooth pop stylist Johnny Mathis that his 1958 album Johnny's Greatest Hits spent an astonishing 490 weeks on the Billboard magazine album charts—a record finally broken by Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon in 1982.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 1, 1890:
Yosemite National Park established

On this day in 1890, an act of Congress creates Yosemite National Park, home of such natural wonders as Half Dome and the giant sequoia trees. Environmental trailblazer John Muir (1838-1914) and his colleagues campaigned for the congressional action, which was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison and paved the way for generations of hikers, campers and nature lovers, along with countless "Don't Feed the Bears" signs.

Native Americans were the main residents of the Yosemite Valley, located in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, until the 1849 gold rush brought thousands of non-Indian miners and settlers to the region. Tourists and damage to Yosemite Valley's ecosystem followed. In 1864, to ward off further commercial exploitation, conservationists convinced President Abraham Lincoln to declare Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias a public trust of California. This marked the first time the U.S. government protected land for public enjoyment and it laid the foundation for the establishment of the national and state park systems. Yellowstone became America's first national park in 1872.

In 1889, John Muir discovered that the vast meadows surrounding Yosemite Valley, which lacked government protection, were being overrun and destroyed by domestic sheep grazing. Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, a fellow environmentalist and influential magazine editor, lobbied for national park status for the large wilderness area around Yosemite Valley. On October 1 of the following year, Congress set aside over 1,500 square miles of land (about the size of Rhode Island) for what would become Yosemite National Park, America’s third national park. In 1906, the state-controlled Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove came under federal jurisdiction with the rest of the park.

Yosemite's natural beauty is immortalized in the black-and-white landscape photographs of Ansel Adams (1902-1984), who at one point lived in the park and spent years photographing it. Today, over 3 million people get back to nature annually at Yosemite and check out such stunning landmarks as the 2,425-foot-high Yosemite Falls, one of the world's tallest waterfalls; rock formations Half Dome and El Capitan, the largest granite monolith in the U.S.; and the three groves of giant sequoias, the world's biggest trees.



Oct 1, 1987:
Earthquake rocks Southern California

An earthquake in Whittier, California, kills 6 people and injures 100 more on this day in 1987. The quake was the largest to hit Southern California since 1971, but not nearly as damaging as the Northridge quake that would devastate parts of Los Angeles seven years later.

Whittier is a small town south of Los Angeles best known as President Richard Nixon's hometown. At 7:42 a.m. on October 1, a 6.1-magnitude earthquake jolted Whittier and the surrounding area for a full 30 seconds, violently shaking people out of their beds and causing unsecured items to crash to the floors in homes throughout the region. Several fires were ignited when gas lines were severed by the earth's movement. Falling debris killed six people and the earthquake caused the area's major highways to be shut down. Despite the strong tremors, there were no major building collapses.

A long series of aftershocks rocked Southern California for days after the earthquake. Reluctant to return to their homes, hundreds of people camped out in public parks for several days. Meanwhile, hospitals were evacuated as a precaution. Some looting was reported during the chaos, but it was not a widespread problem.

It is estimated that the Whittier earthquake caused $100 million in damages.



Oct 1, 1946:
Nazi war criminals sentenced at Nuremberg

On October 1, 1946, 12 high-ranking Nazis are sentenced to death by the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg. Among those condemned to death by hanging were Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi minister of foreign affairs; Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo and chief of the German air force; and Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior. Seven others, including Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's former deputy, were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life. Three others were acquitted.

The trial, which had lasted nearly 10 months, was conducted by an international tribunal made up of representatives from the United States, the USSR, France, and Great Britain. It was the first trial of its kind in history, and the defendants faced charges ranging from crimes against peace to crimes of war and crimes against humanity. On October 16, 10 of the architects of Nazi policy were hanged one by one. Hermann Goering, who at sentencing was called the "leading war aggressor and creator of the oppressive program against the Jews," committed suicide by poison on the eve of his scheduled execution. Nazi Party leader Martin Bormann was condemned to death in absentia; he is now known to have died in Berlin at the end of the war.



Oct 1, 1920:
Scientific American reports that radio will soon be used to transmit music to the home

In an 1888 novel called Looking Backward: 2000-1887, author Edward Bellamy imagined a scene in which a time-traveler from 1887 reacts to a technological advance from the early 21st century that he describes as, "An arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will." In Bellamy's imagination, this astonishing feat was accomplished by a vast network of wires connecting individual homes with centrally located concert halls staffed round-the-clock with live performers. As it turned out, this vision of the year 2000 would come to pass far sooner than Bellamy imagined, and without all the pesky wires. On this day in 1920, Scientific American magazine reported that the rapidly developing medium of radio would soon be used to broadcast music. A revolution in the role of music in everyday life was about to be born.

"It has been well known for some years that by placing a form of telephone transmitter in a concert hall or at any point where music is being played the sound may be carried over telephone wires to an ordinary telephone receiver at a distant point," began the bulletin in the October 1, 1920 issue of the popular science monthly, "but it is only recently that a method of transmitting music by radio has been found possible."

Arguments about radio's origins persist to this day, but its basic workings had been understood for upwards of 20 years at the time of this announcement. It was only in the years immediately following World War I, however, that radio made the transition from scientific curiosity to practical technology. By late 1919, experiments had begun in Britain, the United States and elsewhere that would lead to the breakthrough use of radio not just as a replacement for the telegraph, but as a communications and entertainment medium.

Some of those experiments were taking place in the laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., where station WWV was established to test various means of radio transmission. Relying significantly on amateur radio operators in the local area for feedback on its experiments, the Bureau began successfully testing the transmission of music in late 1919 and early 1920. It was those experiments that led to the public announcement in Scientific American.

"Music can be performed at any place, radiated into the air through an ordinary radio transmitting set and received at any other place, even though hundreds of miles away," the report continued, noting that "the music received can be made as loud as desired by suitable operation of the receiving apparatus." "Experimental concerts are at present being conducted every Friday evening from 8:30 to 11:00 by the Radio Laboratory of the Bureau of Standards....The possibilities of such centralized radio concerts are great and extremely interesting."

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 2, 1985:
Hollywood icon Rock Hudson dies of AIDS

On this day in 1985, actor Rock Hudson, 59, becomes the first major U.S. celebrity to die of complications from AIDS. Hudson's death raised public awareness of the epidemic, which until that time had been ignored by many in the mainstream as a "gay plague."

Hudson, born Leroy Harold Scherer Jr., on November 17, 1925, in Winnetka, Illinois, was a Hollywood heartthrob whose career in movies and TV spanned nearly three decades. With leading-man good looks, Hudson starred in numerous dramas and romantic comedies in the 1950s and 60s, including Magnificent Obsession, Giant and Pillow Talk. In the 1970s, he found success on the small screen with such series as McMillan and Wife. To protect his macho image, Hudson's off-screen life as a gay man was kept secret from the public.

In 1984, while working on the TV show Dynasty, Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS. On July 25, 1985, he publicly acknowledged he had the disease at a hospital in Paris, where he had gone to seek treatment. The news that Hudson, an international icon, had AIDS focused worldwide attention on the disease and helped change public perceptions of it.

The first cases of AIDS were reported in 1981 and the earliest victims were gay men who often faced public hostility and discrimination. As scientists and health care officials called for funding to combat the disease, they were largely ignored by President Ronald Reagan and his administration. Rock Hudson was a friend of Reagan's and his death was said to have changed the president's view of the disease. However, Reagan was criticized for not addressing the issue of AIDS in a major public speech until 1987; by that time, more than 20,000 Americans had already died of the disease and it had spread to over 100 countries. By 2006, the AIDS virus had killed 25 million people worldwide and infected 40 million others.



Oct 2, 2006:
Gunman kills five students at Amish school

Charles Roberts enters the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where he fatally shoots five female students and wounds five more before turning his gun on himself and committing suicide.

Charles Carl Roberts IV, a 32-year-old milk truck driver from a nearby town, entered the one-room schoolhouse at around 10:30 a.m. armed with an arsenal of weapons, ammunition, tools and other items including toilet paper that indicated he planned for the possibility of a long standoff. He forced the 15 boys and several women with infants inside the school to leave and made the 11 girls present line up against the blackboard. Police were contacted about the hostage situation at approximately 10:30 a.m. When they arrived at the schoolhouse a short time later, Roberts had barricaded the school doors with boards he had brought with him and tied up his hostages. Roberts spoke briefly with his wife by cell phone and said he was upset with God over the death of his baby daughter in 1997. He also told her he had molested two girls 20 years earlier and was having fantasies about molesting children again. At approximately 11 a.m., Roberts spoke with a 911 dispatcher and said if the police didn’t leave he’d start shooting. Seconds after, he shot five of the students. When authorities stormed the schoolhouse, Roberts shot himself in the head.

Roberts, a father of three, had no criminal history or record of mental illness. Additionally, his family knew nothing about his claims that he had molested two young female relatives. The Amish community, known for their religious devotion, as well as wearing traditional clothing and shunning certain modern conveniences, consoled Roberts’ wife in the wake of the tragedy; some members even attended his funeral. Ten days after the shootings, the Amish tore down the schoolhouse and eventually built a new one nearby.



Oct 2, 1836:
Darwin returns to England

The British naturalist Charles Darwin returns to Falmouth, England, aboard the HMS Beagle, ending a five-year surveying expedition of the southern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Visiting such diverse places as Brazil, the Galapagos Islands, and New Zealand, Darwin acquired an intimate knowledge of the flora, fauna, and geology of many lands. This information proved invaluable in the development of his theory of evolution, first put forth in his groundbreaking scientific work of 1859, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

Darwin's theory argued that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called "natural selection." In natural selection, organisms with genetic variations that suit their environment tend to propagate more descendants than organisms of the same species that lack the variation, thus influencing the overall genetic makeup of the species. His Origin of Species, the first significant work on the theory of evolution, was greeted with great interest in the scientific world but was attacked by religious leaders for its contradiction of the biblical account of creation.



Oct 2, 1944:
Warsaw Uprising ends

The Warsaw Uprising ends with the surrender of the surviving Polish rebels to German forces.

Two months earlier, the approach of the Red Army to Warsaw prompted Polish resistance forces to launch a rebellion against the Nazi occupation. The rebels, who supported the democratic Polish government-in-exile in London, hoped to gain control of the city before the Soviets "liberated" it. The Poles feared that if they failed to take the city the Soviet conquerors would forcibly set up a pro-Soviet communist regime in Poland.

The poorly supplied Poles made early gains against the Germans, but Nazi leader Adolf Hitler sent reinforcements. In brutal street fighting, the Poles were gradually overcome by superior German weaponry. Meanwhile, the Red Army occupied a suburb of Warsaw but made no efforts to aid the Polish rebels. The Soviets also rejected a request by the British to use Soviet air bases to airlift supplies to the beleaguered Poles.

After 63 days, the Poles--out of arms, supplies, food, and water--were forced to surrender. In the aftermath, the Nazis deported much of Warsaw's population and destroyed the city. With protestors in Warsaw out of the way, the Soviets faced little organized opposition in establishing a communist government in Poland.



Oct 2, 1971:
Rod Stewart earns his first #1 hit with "Maggie May"

If living well is the best revenge, then Rod Stewart has long since avenged the critical barbs he's suffered through the years. Still active in his fifth decade as a recording star, he can point to nearly three dozen pop hits and nearly 40 million albums sold as proof that he's done something very right. Yet all of his commercial success wouldn't silence those purists who believe that Rod Stewart wasted the greatest male voice in rock history by putting it to use in service of disco anthems and an endless string of generic adult-contemporary ballads. Whatever one's opinion about Stewart's musical choices few could deny the pure perfection of his performance on one of the greatest rock songs of all time, "Maggie May," which became Rod Stewart's first #1 hit on this day in 1971.

An international hit that topped the U.K. and U.S. pop charts simultaneously in the autumn of 1971, "Maggie May" was a last-minute addition to the album Every Picture Tells a Story and was originally released as the "B" side to the single "Reason To Believe." Soon, however, radio programmers began flipping "Reason To Believe" in favor of "Maggie May," the possibly autobiographical tale of a young man reflecting wistfully on the end of a love affair with an older woman. With its ringing acoustic guitar and mandolin arrangement, "Maggie May" reflected the full range of influences that had shaped a singer-songwriter then better known for the harder-edged music of the rock bands he'd fronted in the late 1960s and very early 1970s: the Faces and the Jeff Beck Group. But Rod Stewart had begun his path to stardom as an itinerant banjo- and harmonica-playing Bob Dylan devotee, and it was that folk sensibility that helped make "Maggie May" such a standout hit.

"Maggie May" and Every Picture Tells a Story launched Rod Stewart's spectacular solo career—a career that has included 33 subsequent top-40 hits on the American pop chart, including two subsequent #1s in "Tonight's The Night (Gonna Be Alright)" (1977), "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" (1979). Rod Stewart's detractors may believe that they also marked a creative high point in a career that has seen more success among record-buyers and concert-goers than among rock critics, yet those record-buyers and concert-goers continue to support a singer who has even managed to reinvent himself successfully as a crooner of jazz standards in his fifth decade as a major pop star.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 3, 1781:
French and Americans cut off British supplies at Gloucester

On this day in 1781, British Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Dundas of the 80th Foot, leading 1,000 British troops, encounters French Brigadier General Marquis de Choisy, leading French troops and a battalion of the Virginia militia totaling 800 men. The action takes place in Gloucester, Virginia, across the York River from British-occupied Yorktown, which was under Patriot siege.

On September 28, 17,000 combined Continental and French forces commanded jointly on land by General George Washington and French Lieutenant General Count de Rochambeau and at sea by French Admiral Count de Grasse had arrived to encircle British General Charles Cornwallis' camp at Yorktown and began the siege. Prior to the encounter as Gloucester, Dundas and the British had enjoyed complete control of a strategic countryside position on the Gloucester side of the York River. The control of this area allowed the British to forage for nearly unlimited food and supplies, not only for themselves, but for Cornwallis and his British troops located across the river in Yorktown, which limited the success of the Patriot siege.

While returning to camp on the evening of October 3, 1781, Dundas and the British were engaged in battle by General de Choisy. Although the ensuing battle between British and Patriot-allied forces was relatively small, it was nonetheless important, because it cut off supplies to General Cornwallis and the British troops across the river in Yorktown. The capture of Gloucester, Virginia, was one of the final steps toward the eventual Patriot victory at Yorktown just 16 days later.



Oct 3, 1990:
East and West Germany reunite after 45 years

Less than one year after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, East and West Germany come together on what is known as "Unity Day." Since 1945, when Soviet forces occupied eastern Germany, and the United States and other Allied forces occupied the western half of the nation at the close of World War II, divided Germany had come to serve as one of the most enduring symbols of the Cold War. Some of the most dramatic episodes of the Cold War took place there. The Berlin Blockade (June 1948--May 1949), during which the Soviet Union blocked all ground travel into West Berlin, and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 were perhaps the most famous. 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. 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.



Oct 3, 1932:
Iraq wins independence

With the admission of Iraq into the League of Nations, Britain terminates its mandate over the Arab nation, making Iraq independent after 17 years of British rule and centuries of Ottoman rule.

Britain seized Iraq from Ottoman Turkey during World War I and was granted a mandate by the League of Nations to govern the nation in 1920. A Hashemite monarchy was organized under British protection in 1921, and on October 3, 1932, the kingdom of Iraq was granted independence. The Iraqi government maintained close economic and military ties with Britain, leading to several anti-British revolts. A pro-Axis revolt in 1941 led to a British military intervention, and the Iraqi government agreed to support the Allied war effort. In 1958, the monarchy was overthrown, and for the next two decades Iraq was ruled by a series of military and civilian governments. In 1979, General Saddam Hussein became Iraqi dictator; he held onto power with an iron fist, until disappearing in the face of an American-led coaliation's invasion of Iraq in 2003.



Oct 3, 1952:
Britain successfully tests A-bomb

Britain successfully tests its first atomic bomb at the Monte Bello Islands, off the northwest coast of Australia.

During World War II, 50 British scientists and engineers worked on the successful U.S. atomic bomb program at Los Alamos, New Mexico. After the war, many of these scientists were enlisted into the secret effort to build an atomic bomb for Britain. Work on the British A-bomb officially began in 1947, and Los Alamos veteran William Penney served as the program head. In February 1952, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill publicly announced the plans to test a British nuclear weapon, and on October 3 a 25-kiloton device--similar to the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan--was successfully detonated in the hull of the frigate HMS Plym anchored off the Monte Bello Islands. The test made Britain the world's third atomic power after the United States and the Soviet Union.



Oct 3, 1967:
Writer, singer and folk icon Woody Guthrie dies

On October 3, 1967, Woody Guthrie, godfather of the 1950s folk revival movement, dies.

In 1963, Bob Dylan was asked by the authors of a forthcoming book on Woody Guthrie to contribute a 25-word comment summarizing his thoughts on the man who had probably been his greatest formative influence. Dylan responded instead with a 194-line poem called "Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," which took as its theme the eternal human search for hope. "And where do you look for this hope that yer seekin'?" Dylan asks in the poem, before proceeding to a kind of answer:

You can either go to the church of your choice

Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital

You'll find God in the church of your choice

You'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, whom Dylan would later call "the true voice of the American spirit," was a native of Okemah, Oklahoma, who was born in 1912 and thus entered adulthood just as America entered the Great Depression. Already an accomplished, self-taught musician, Woody Guthrie began writing music in earnest following his experiences traveling west to California with other Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930s. His first public exposure came during the latter part of that decade as a regular on radio station KFVD Los Angeles, but his most important work took place following a move to New York City in 1939.

In his first two years in New York, Guthrie made a series of landmark recordings for Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress as well as the album Dust Bowl Ballads, which served as the first introduction for many to a form that Guthrie helped pioneer: protest folk. Most famously in "This Land Is Your Land"—written in 1940 and first recorded in 1944—Guthrie fused long-established American musical traditions with a populist, left-wing political sensibility to create an entirely new template for contemporary folk. In so doing, of course, he laid the groundwork not only for the great folk revival of the 1950s and 60s, but also for such iconoclastic heirs to that movement as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

In his late 30s, Woody Guthrie began to fall ill, displaying the ambiguous physical and psychological symptoms of what would eventually be diagnosed as Huntington's chorea, a genetic disorder that had probably killed his mother in 1930. In the 1950s, treatment for Huntington's generally meant institutionalization in a psychiatric hospital, and Woody Guthrie spent his final 12 years in such facilities. In fact, it was in New Jersey's Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital that a young Bob Dylan first encountered the man he'd traveled all the way from Minnesota to see.

Woody Guthrie was moved to Brooklyn State Hospital in 1961 and again in 1966 to Creedmore Psychiatric Center in the borough of Queens. He died at Creedmore on this day in 1967, at the age of 55.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 4, 1957:
Sputnik launched

The Soviet Union inaugurates the "Space Age" with its launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for "satellite," was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic. Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee (nearest point) of 143 miles. Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day. In January 1958, Sputnik's orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.

Officially, Sputnik was launched to correspond with the International Geophysical Year, a solar period that the International Council of Scientific Unions declared would be ideal for the launching of artificial satellites to study Earth and the solar system. However, many Americans feared more sinister uses of the Soviets' new rocket and satellite technology, which was apparently strides ahead of the U.S. space effort. Sputnik was some 10 times the size of the first planned U.S. satellite, which was not scheduled to be launched until the next year. The U.S. government, military, and scientific community were caught off guard by the Soviet technological achievement, and their united efforts to catch up with the Soviets heralded the beginning of the "space race."

The first U.S. satellite, Explorer, was launched on January 31, 1958. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late 1950s and early 1960s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. However, the United States took a giant leap ahead in the space race in the late '60s with the Apollo lunar-landing program, which successfully landed two Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon in July 1969.



Oct 4, 1992:
Plane crashes into apartment building

A cargo plane crashes into an apartment building near an airport in Amsterdam, Holland, on this day in 1992. Four people aboard the plane and approximately 100 more in the apartment building lost their lives in the disaster.

An El-Al Boeing 747 cargo jet was scheduled to bring 114 tons of computers, machinery, textiles and various other materials from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv, Israel, on October 4. At 6:30 that Sunday evening, Captain Isaac Fuchs piloted the jet, carrying two other pilots and one passenger, out of Schipol Airport in good weather. However, only minutes after takeoff, fires broke out in the plane's third and fourth engines and they fell right off the wing.

Fuchs decided to dump the plane's fuel in a lake and head back to the airport, but the plane did not have enough power to make the return trip. Six miles short of the airport, Fuchs radioed, "Going down," and the plane plunged straight into an apartment building in the Bijimermeer section of Amsterdam. A massive fireball exploded through the building. Firefighters rushed to the scene, but by the time the fire was under control, about 100 people were dead. An exact number was impossible to determine, as the explosion made body identification extremely difficult and the building housed mainly undocumented immigrants from Suriname and Aruba.

The accident was very similar to one that had taken place in Taiwan less than a year earlier, in which a China Airlines jet had crashed after losing its two right engines. An investigation into that crash had revealed the problem to be related to a fuse pin, part of the mechanism that binds the engines to the wings. Both crashes probably resulted from the fatigue and failure of this part.



Oct 4, 1965:
Pope visits U.S.

Pope Paul VI arrives at Kennedy International Airport in New York City on the first visit by a reigning pope to the United States. During his packed one-day American visit--limited entirely to New York City--Pope Paul VI visited St. Patrick's Cathedral and Cardinal Francis Spellman's residence, met with President Lyndon Johnson at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations, attended a public Mass at Yankee Stadium, visited the Vatican Exhibit at the New York World's Fair, and then flew to Rome from Kennedy Airport. During less than 14 hours in the United States, the pope was seen in person by one million people and on television by an another 100 million.
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Oct 4, 1970:
Janis Joplin dies of a heroin overdose

In the summer of 1966, Janis Joplin was a drifter; four years later, she was a rock-and-roll legend. She'd gone from complete unknown to generational icon on the strength of a single, blistering performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in the summer of 1967, and she'd followed that up with three years of touring and recording that cemented her status as, in the words of one critic, "second only to Bob Dylan in importance as a creator/recorder/embodiment of her generation's history and mythology."

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1943, Janis Joplin made her way to San Francisco in 1966, where she fell in with a local group called Big Brother and the Holding Company. It was with this group that she would become famous, first through her legendary performance of "Ball And Chain" at Monterey and then with the 1968 album Cheap Thrills. She soon split off to launch a solo career, however, her personality and her voice being far too big to be contained within a group.

"I'd rather not sing than sing quiet," she once said in comparing herself to one of her musical idols. "Billie Holliday was subtle and refined. I'm going to shove that power right into you, right through you and you can't refuse it." But if sheer abandon was Janis Joplin's vocal trademark, she nevertheless always combined it with a musicality and authenticity that lent her music a great deal more soul than much of what the psychedelic era produced.

But it was never just music, or the passion she displayed in performing it, that made Janis Joplin an icon. It was the no-holds-barred gusto with which she lived every other aspect of her life as well. Far from being an empty cliché, "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" was a revolutionary philosophy to many in the late 1960s, and Janis Joplin was its leading female exponent. Her string of romantic conquests ranged from Kris Kristofferson to Dick Cavett. Her drug and alcohol consumption was prolific. And the rock and roll she produced was timeless, from "Piece Of My Heart," "Get It While You Can" and "Mercedes Benz" to her biggest pop hit, "Me And My Bobby McGee."

In the autumn of 1970, Janis Joplin was in Los Angeles putting the finishing touches on the album that would prove to be the biggest hit of her career, Pearl. She did not live to see the album's release, however. On this day in 1970, she died of an accidental heroin overdose and was discovered in her Los Angeles hotel room after failing to show for a scheduled recording session. She was 27 years old.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 5, 1969:
Cuban defector lands MiG in Miami

In an embarrassing breach of the United States' air-defense capability, a Cuban defector enters U.S. air space undetected and lands his Soviet-made MiG-17 at Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami, Florida. The presidential aircraft Air Force One was at the base at the time, waiting to return President Richard M. Nixon to Washington. The base was subsequently put on continuous alert, and it opened a new radar tracking facility to prevent the repetition of a similar incident in the future.



Oct 5, 1989:
Dalai Lama wins Peace Prize

The Dalai Lama, the exiled religious and political leader of Tibet, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his nonviolent campaign to end the Chinese domination of Tibet.

The 14th Dalai Lama was born as Tenzin Gyatso in Tsinghai Province, China, in 1935. He was of Tibetan parentage, and Tibetan monks visited him when he was three and announced him to be the reincarnation of the late 13th Dalai Lama. The monks were guided by omens, portents, and dreams that indicated where the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama could be found. At age five, Tenzin Gyatso was taken to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and installed as the leader of Tibetan Buddhism.

Tibet, a large region situated in the plateaus and mountains of Central Asia, had been ruled by the Dalai Lamas since the 14th century. Tibetans resisted efforts by China to gain greater control over the region in the early 20th century, and during the Chinese Revolution of 1911-12, the Tibetans expelled Chinese officials and civilians and formally declared their independence.

In October 1950, Chinese Communist forces invaded Tibet and quickly overwhelmed the country's poorly equipped army. The young Dalai Lama appealed to the United Nations for support, but his entreaties were denied. In 1951, a Tibetan-Chinese peace agreement was signed, in which the nation became a "national autonomous region" of China, supposedly under the rule of the Dalai Lama but actually under the control of a Chinese Communist commission. The highly religious people of Tibet suffered under Communist China's anti-religious legislation.

After years of scattered protests in Tibet, a full-scale revolt broke out in March 1959, and the Dalai Lama fled with 100,000 other Tibetans as Chinese troops crushed the uprising. He began an exile in India, settling at Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills, where he established a democratically based shadow Tibetan government. Back in Tibet, the Chinese adopted brutally repressive measures against the Tibetans, provoking charges from the Dalai Lama of genocide. With the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China, the Chinese suppression of Tibetan Buddhism escalated, and practice of the religion was banned and thousands of monasteries were destroyed.

The religious-practice ban was lifted in 1976, but suppression in Tibet continued. From his base at Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama traveled the world, successfully drawing international attention to the continuing Chinese suppression of the Tibetan people and their religion. Major anti-Chinese riots broke out in Lhasa in 1987, and in 1988 China declared martial law in the region. Seeking peace, the Dalai Lama abandoned his demand for Tibetan independence and called for a true self-governing Tibet, with China in charge of defense and foreign affairs. China rejected the offer. The following year, the Dalai Lama was the recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Peace. His autobiography, Freedom in Exile, was published in 1990.

Tibet continued to suffer from periodic unrest in the 1990s, and China came under criticism from Western governments for its suppression of political and religious freedom there. The Chinese government has since made efforts to moderate its stance in the region, but Tibet remains without self-government. After more than four decades of exile, the Dalai Lama continues to travel, publicizing the Tibetan cause.



Oct 5, 1978:
Isaac Singer wins Nobel Prize

On this day in 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer wins the Nobel Prize for literature. Singer wrote in Yiddish about Jewish life in Poland and the United States, and translations of his work became popular in mainstream America as well as Jewish circles.

Singer was born in Poland in 1904 into a long line of Hasidic rabbis. He studied at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminar, and inspired by his older brother Joshua, a writer, he began to write his own stories and novels. He published his first novel, Satan in Goray, in Poland in 1935.

The same year, he immigrated to the United States, where Joshua had already moved, to escape growing anti-Semitism in Europe. In New York, he wrote for a Yiddish-language newspaper. His mother and another brother were killed by the Nazis in 1939, the same year that Singer married Alma, the daughter of a Jewish merchant who had fled to the United States. In 1943, Singer became a U.S. citizen. His best-known works include The Family Moskat (1950), The Manor (1967), and The Estate (1969), all about the changes in and disintegration of Jewish families responding to assimilation pressures. Singer's work is full of Jewish folklore and legends, peopled with devils, witches, and goblins. He wrote 12 books of short stories, 13 children's books, and four memoirs. One of his stories, Yentl, was made into a movie directed by and starring Barbara Streisand in 1983. Singer divided his time between New York and Miami until his death, in 1991.



Oct 5, 1991:
Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch earn a #1 hit with "Good Vibrations"

Failed attempts by Hollywood actors to achieve success as singers or rappers are plentiful in the history of pop music. Examples of such unsuccessful crossovers abound, from William Shatner's "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" (1968) and Eddie Murphy's "Party All The Time" (1985) to the entire musical oeuvres of Bruce Willis, David Hasselhoff and Steven Seagal. But only one prominent example springs to mind in which this familiar formula was reversed, and a lackluster career in music preceded a successful career as a respected actor. That example is the career of the actor Mark Wahlberg, who first gained fame as the rapper Marky Mark, whose #1 hit "Good Vibrations" reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1991.

Mark Wahlberg's musical career began alongside his older brother Donnie as one of the two original members of the New Kids on the Block. Young Mark dropped out of the New Kids before their late-80s breakout, however, becoming involved in petty crime instead. Then in 1991, he began working alongside Donnie toward a career in hip hop, resulting in the album Music For The People. Whether because of the inherent catchiness of a song built around a sample of Loleatta Holloway's "Love Sensations" or because of Wahlberg's eagerness to show off his impressive physique in music videos and live appearances, "Good Vibrations" became an instant smash hit, reaching the top of the pop chart on October 5, 1991.

Fresh from his success as a rapper, Wahlberg put out an exercise video called The Marky Mark Workout: Form... Focus... Fitness and further parlayed his physique into a lucrative contract as an underwear model for Calvin Klein. His move into acting began in 1993 and took off after 1995's The Basketball Diaries and, especially, 1997's Boogie Nights.

Seventeen years after his breakthrough hit as a rapper, Wahlberg declined an opportunity to join the reunited Funky Bunch on a reunion tour. "Not a [expletive] chance," Wahlberg told MTV News in the summer of 2008. "How am I going to explain [Marky Mark] to my kids?" he continued. "I have a few years to think about how to explain it and finesse it. But I do think about it on a daily basis."

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 6, 1973:
The Yom Kippur War brings United States and USSR to brink of conflict

The surprise attack by Egyptian and Syrian forces on Israel in October 1973 throws the Middle East into turmoil and threatens to bring the United States and the Soviet Union into direct conflict for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Though actual combat did not break out between the two nations, the events surrounding the Yom Kippur War seriously damaged U.S.-Soviet relations and all but destroyed President Richard Nixon's much publicized policy of detente.

Initially, it appeared that Egypt and Syria would emerge victorious from the conflict. Armed with up-to-date Soviet weaponry, the two nations hoped to avenge their humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel, caught off guard, initially reeled under the two-front attack, but Israeli counterattacks turned the tide, aided by massive amounts of U.S. military assistance, as well as disorganization among the Syrian and Egyptian forces. The Syrians were driven back, with Israeli troops seizing the strategically important Golan Heights. Egyptian forces fared even worse: retreating back through the Sinai Desert, thousands of their troops were surrounded and cut off by the Israeli army. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, together with his Soviet counterparts, eventually arranged a shaky cease-fire. When it became clear that Israel would not give up its siege of the Egyptian troops (low on food and medicine by this time), the Soviets threatened to take unilateral action to rescue them. Tempers flared both in Washington and Moscow; U.S. military forces went to a Stage 3 alert (Stage 5 is the launch of nuclear attacks). The Soviets backed down on their threat but the damage to relations between the two nations was serious and long lasting.

Kissinger worked furiously to bring about a peace settlement between Israel and Syria and Egypt. In what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy," the secretary of state flew from nation to nation hammering out the details of the peace accord. Eventually, Israeli troops withdrew from some of their positions in both the Sinai and Syrian territory, while Egypt promised to forego the use of force in its dealings with Israel. Syria grudgingly accepted the peace plan, but remained adamantly opposed to the existence of the Israeli state.



Oct 6, 1981:
The president of Egypt is assassinated

Islamic extremists assassinate Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, as he reviews troops on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Led by Khaled el Islambouli, a lieutenant in the Egyptian army with connections to the terrorist group Takfir Wal-Hajira, the terrorists, all wearing army uniforms, stopped in front of the reviewing stand and fired shots and threw grenades into a crowd of Egyptian government officials. Sadat, who was shot four times, died two hours later. Ten other people also died in the attack.

Despite Sadat's incredible public service record for Egypt (he was instrumental in winning the nation its independence and democratizing it), his controversial peace negotiation with Israel in 1977-78, for which he and Menachem Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize, made him a target of Islamic extremists across the Middle East. Sadat had also angered many by allowing the ailing Shah of Iran to die in Egypt rather than be returned to Iran to stand trial for his crimes against the country.

Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi, who sponsored Takfir Wal-Hajira, had engineered his own unsuccessful attempt on Sadat's life in 1980. Despite the well-known threats on his life, Sadat did not withdraw from the public eye, believing it was important to the country's well-being that he be open and available.

Before executing their plan, Islambouli's team of assassins took hits of hashish to honor a long-standing Middle Eastern tradition. As their vehicle passed the reviewing stand, they jumped out and started firing. Vice President Hosni Mubarak was sitting near Sadat but managed to survive the attack. Taking over the country when Sadat died, Mubarak arrested hundreds of people suspected to have participated in the conspiracy to kill Sadat.

Eventually, charges were brought against 25 men, who went to trial in November. Many of those charged were unrepentant and proudly admitted their involvement. Islambouli and four others were executed, while 17 others were sentenced to prison time.



Oct 6, 1683:
First Mennonites arrive in America

Encouraged by William Penn's offer of 5,000 acres of land in the colony of Pennsylvania and the freedom to practice their religion, the first Mennonites arrive in America aboard the Concord. They were among the first Germans to settle in the American colonies.

The Mennonites, members of a Protestant sect founded by Menno Simons in the 16th century, were widely persecuted in Europe. Seeking religious freedom, Mennonite Francis Daniel Pastorious led a group from Krefeld, Germany, to Pennsylvania in 1683 and founded Germantown, the pioneer German settlement in America and now part of the city of Philadelphia. Numerous other German groups followed, and by the American Revolution there were 100,000 Germans in William Penn's former colony, more than a third of Pennsylvania's total population at the time.



Oct 6, 1961:
Kennedy urges Americans to build bomb shelters

President John F. Kennedy, speaking on civil defense, advises American families to build bomb shelters to protect them from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Kennedy also assured the public that the U.S. civil defense program would soon begin providing such protection for every American. Only one year later, true to Kennedy's fears, the world hovered on the brink of full-scale nuclear war when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted over the USSR's placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba. During the tense 13-day crisis, some Americans prepared for nuclear war by buying up canned goods and completing last-minute work on their backyard bomb shelters.



Oct 6, 1996:
Country superstars Faith Hill and Tim McGraw wed

Following the 2008 wedding of hip-hop titan Jay-Z and R&B goddess Beyonce, there can be little doubt which pairing of married stars ranks as the music world's greatest power couple. But if marital longevity is factored into the formula in addition to star power and sheer commercial might, then Mr. Carter and Ms. Knowles would have to take a back seat to Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. However long the marriage of those two country superstars may yet last, their wedding on this day in 1996 created one of the most commercially successful pairings the world of popular music has ever seen.

Born just five months apart in May and September of 1967, respectively, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill followed similar paths to stardom and arrived there at nearly the exact same time. Both were raised in the South—McGraw in Delhi, Louisiana, and Hill (born Audrey Faith Perry) in Ridgeland, Mississippi—and both left college short of graduation to pursue their careers in music in Nashville in the late 1980s. In 1993, both released a debut album, though only Hill's was an unqualified success. Take Me As I Am reached #7 on the country album charts on the strength of the #1 country single, "Wild One," and Hill was honored as the Top New Female Vocalist at the 1993 Academy of Country Music Awards. McGraw's breakthrough came only slightly later, with his sophomore album Not A Moment Too Soon, which topped both the country album chart and the Billboard 200 pop album chart, yielding two #1 country singles in "Don't Take The Girl" and the title track, "Not A Moment Too Soon." McGraw, in turn, was awarded the Top New Male Vocalist Award at the 1994 Academy of Country Music Awards in addition to taking home Album of the Year honors.

Two years later, both Faith Hill and Tim McGraw were well-established superstars when they chose to team up on their "Spontaneous Combustion" tour in early 1996. Already engaged to another man at the outset of the tour, opening act Faith Hill had a new fiancée in headliner Tim McGraw before the tour came to an end. The two were wed in a small family ceremony in McGraw's native Louisiana on October 6, 1996, and according to published reports, they have not spent more than three consecutive days apart since.

Collectively, they have also had an astonishing 12 #1 albums and 25 #1 singles on the country charts since their marriage, in addition to three daughters.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 7, 2003:
Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes California governor

On this day in 2003, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger is elected governor of California, the most populous state in the nation with the world's fifth-largest economy. Despite his inexperience, Schwarzenegger came out on top in the 11-week campaign to replace Gray Davis, who had earlier become the first United States governor to be recalled by the people since 1921. Schwarzenegger was one of 135 candidates on the ballot, which included career politicians, other actors, and one adult-film star.

Born in Thal, Austria, on July 30, 1947, Arnold Schwarzenegger began body-building as a teenager. He won the first of four "Mr. Universe" body-building championships at the age of 20, and moved to the United States in 1968. He also went on to win a then-record seven "Mr. Olympia" championships, securing his reputation as a body-building legend, and soon began appearing in films. Schwarzenegger first attracted mainstream public attention for a Golden Globe®-winning performance in Stay Hungry (1976) and his appearance in the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron. At the same time, he was working on a B.A. at the University of Wisconsin, from which he graduated in 1979.

Schwarzenegger's film career took off after his starring turn in 1982's Conan the Barbarian. In 1983, he became a U.S. citizen; the next year he made his most famous film, The Terminator, directed by James Cameron. Although his acting talent is probably aptly described as limited, Schwarzenegger went on to become one of the most sought-after action-film stars of the 1980s and early 1990s and enjoyed an extremely lucrative career. The actor's romantic life also captured the attention of the American public: he married television journalist and lifelong Democrat Maria Shriver, niece of the late President John F. Kennedy, in 1986.

With his film career beginning to stagnate, Schwarzenegger, a staunch supporter of the Republican party who had long been thought to harbor political aspirations, announced his candidacy for governor of California during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Aside from his well-known stint serving as chairman of the President s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports under President George H.W. Bush, Schwarzenegger had little political experience. His campaign, which featured his use of myriad one-liners well-known from his movie career, was dogged by criticism of his use of anabolic steroids, as well as allegations of sexual misconduct and racism. Still, Schwarzenegger was able to parlay his celebrity into a win, appealing to weary California voters with talk of reform. He beat his closest challenger, the Democratic lieutenant governor Cruz Bustamante, by more than 1 million votes.



Oct 7, 1960:
Kennedy and Nixon debate Cold War foreign policy

In the second of four televised debates, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon turn their attention to foreign policy issues. Three Cold War episodes, in particular, engendered spirited confrontations between Kennedy and Nixon. The first involved Cuba, which had recently come under the control of Fidel Castro. Nixon argued that the island was not "lost" to the United States, and that the course of action followed by the Eisenhower administration had been the best one to allow the Cuban people to "realize their aspirations of progress through freedom." Kennedy fired back that it was clear that Castro was a communist, and that the Republican administration failed to use U.S. resources effectively to prevent his rise to power. He concluded that, "Today Cuba is lost for freedom."

The second point of contention revolved around the downing of an American U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union and the subsequent canceling of the U.S.-Soviet summit set for May 1960. Kennedy argued that the United States was "not in accordance with international law" in the case, and should have expressed its regrets to the Soviet Union in an attempt to keep the summit on track. Nixon fired back that Kennedy was simply wrong: the Soviets never really wanted the summit to take place and simply used the incident as an excuse.

The two candidates continued their discussions of foreign policy in the next two debates, but the lines had clearly been drawn. Kennedy's strategy was to paint the Republican administration in which Nixon served as timid, indecisive, and given to poor strategizing in terms of the Cold War. Nixon, on the other hand, wanted to portray Kennedy as naive and much too willing to compromise with the Soviets and communist Chinese. Whether the debates really changed any voters' minds is uncertain. While many speech experts argue that Nixon really won the debates, media analysts claim that Kennedy's telegenic presence swayed enough voters for him to win the extremely close 1960 election.



Oct 7, 1780:
Battle of King's Mountain

During the American Revolution, Patriot irregulars under Colonel William Campbell defeat Tories under Major Patrick Ferguson at the Battle of King's Mountain in South Carolina.

Major Ferguson's Tory force, made up mostly of American Loyalists from South Carolina and elsewhere, was the western wing of General Lord Cornwallis' North Carolina invasion force. One thousand American frontiersmen under Colonel Campbell of Virginia gathered in the backcountry to resist Ferguson's advance. Pursued by the Patriots, Ferguson positioned his Tory force in defense of a rocky, treeless ridge named King's Mountain. The Patriots charged the hillside multiple times, demonstrating lethal marksmanship against the surrounded Loyalists.

Unwilling to surrender to a "band of banditti," Ferguson led a suicidal charge down the mountain and was cut down in a hail of bullets. After his death, some of his men tried to surrender, but they were slaughtered in cold blood by the frontiersmen, who were bitter over British excesses in the Carolinas. The Tories suffered 157 killed, 163 wounded, and 698 captured. Colonel Campbell's force suffered just 28 killed and 60 wounded.



Oct 7, 1949:
East Germany created

Less than five months after Great Britain, the United States, and France established the Federal Republic of Germany in West Germany, the Democratic Republic of Germany is proclaimed within the Soviet occupation zone. Criticized by the West as an un-autonomous Soviet creation, Wilhelm Pieck was named East Germany's first president, with Otto Grotewohl as prime minister.

Approximately half the size of West Germany, East Germany consisted of the German states of Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Lusatia, Saxony, and Thuringia. Berlin, the former German capital, remained divided between West and East German authorities, even though it was situated deep within the communist Democratic Republic of Germany. East Germany ceased to exist in 1990, when its land and people were absorbed into the democratic Federal Republic of Germany.



Oct 7, 1975:
A New York judge reverses John Lennon's deportation order

On this day in 1975, a New York State Supreme Court judge reverses a deportation order for John Lennon, allowing him to remain legally in his adoptive home of New York City.

Protests against the Vietnam War had escalated significantly following the announcement of the Cambodia invasion on April 30, 1970, and the shooting deaths of four student protestors at Kent State just four days later. Many such gatherings would feature peaceful demonstrators singing Lennon's 1969 anthem "Give Peace A Chance," but others were more threatening. Newly relocated to New York City, John Lennon began to associate publicly with such radical figures as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale, and the White House reportedly grew concerned, according to the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, over his potentially powerful influence with a generation of 18-to-20-year-olds who would be allowed, for the very first time, to vote in the 1972 presidential election. "I suppose if you were going to list your enemies and decide who is most dangerous," Walter Cronkite would later say, "if I were Nixon, I would put Lennon up near the top."

Leon Wildes, the immigration attorney who would handle Lennon's case over the next four-plus years, would say of his client's reaction to the case, "He understood that what was being done to him was wrong. It was an abuse of the law, and he was willing to stand up and try to show it—to shine the big light on it." Lennon's persistence in fighting the case finally paid off on October 7, 1975, with a court decision that left no question as to the real motives behind the deportation: "The courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds," wrote Judge Irving Kaufman, who also went on to say, "Lennon's four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in this American dream."

Less than one year later, in June 1976, John Lennon got his green card.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 8, 1871:
Great Chicago Fire begins

On this day in 1871, flames spark in the Chicago barn of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, igniting a two-day blaze that kills between 200 and 300 people, destroys 17,450 buildings, leaves 100,000 homeless and causes an estimated $200 million (in 1871 dollars; $3 billion in 2007 dollars) in damages. Legend has it that a cow kicked over a lantern in the O'Leary barn and started the fire, but other theories hold that humans or even a comet may have been responsible for the event that left four square miles of the Windy City, including its business district, in ruins. Dry weather and an abundance of wooden buildings, streets and sidewalks made Chicago vulnerable to fire. The city averaged two fires per day in 1870; there were 20 fires throughout Chicago the week before the Great Fire of 1871.

Despite the fire's devastation, much of Chicago's physical infrastructure, including its water, sewage and transportation systems, remained intact. Reconstruction efforts began quickly and spurred great economic development and population growth, as architects laid the foundation for a modern city featuring the world's first skyscrapers. At the time of the fire, Chicago's population was approximately 324,000; within nine years, there were 500,000 Chicagoans. By 1893, the city was a major economic and transportation hub with an estimated population of 1.5 million. That same year, Chicago was chosen to host the World's Columbian Exposition, a major tourist attraction visited by 27.5 million people, or approximately half the U.S. population at the time.

In 1997, the Chicago City Council exonerated Mrs. O'Leary and her cow. She turned into a recluse after the fire, and died in 1895.



Oct 8, 1970:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wins the Nobel Prize in literature

The best-known living Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, wins the Nobel Prize for literature. Born in 1918 in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn was a leading writer and critic of Soviet internal oppression. Arrested in 1945 for criticizing the Stalin regime, he served eight years in Russian prisons and labor camps. Upon his release in 1953 he was sent into "internal exile" in Asiatic Russia. After Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn was released from his exile and began writing in earnest. His first publication, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963), appeared in the somewhat less repressive atmosphere of Nikita Khrushchev's regime (1955-1964). The book was widely read in both Russia and the West, and its harsh criticisms of Stalinist repression provided a dramatic insight into the Soviet system.

Eventually, however, Soviet officials clamped down on Solzhenitsyn and other Russian artists, and henceforth his works had to be secreted out of Russia in order to be published. These works included Cancer Ward (1968) and the massive three-volume The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956 (1973-1978). The Soviet government further demonstrated its displeasure over Solzhenitsyn's writings by preventing him from personally accepting his Nobel Prize in 1970. In 1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Union for treason, and he moved to the United States. Although celebrated as a symbol of anticommunist resistance, Solzhenitsyn was also extremely critical of many aspects of American society; particularly what he termed its incessant materialism. He returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure in Moscow on August 3, 2008. He was 89.



Oct 8, 1919:
First transcontinental air race

The first transcontinental air race in the United States begins, with 63 planes competing in the round-trip aerial derby between California and New York. As 15 planes departed the Presidio in San Francisco, California, 48 planes left Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York.

Lieutenant Belvin Maynard, flying a Havilland-4 with a Liberty motor, won the 5,400-mile race across the continent and back. Maynard reached the Presidio in just over three days, rested and serviced his plane for another three days, and then returned to Roosevelt Field in just under four days. Maynard won for the lowest total elapsed time, but in actual flight time--24 hours, 59 minutes, and 49 seconds--three others accomplished the round-trip journey faster.



Oct 8, 1967:
Che Guevara defeated

A Bolivian guerrilla force led by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara is defeated in a skirmish with a special detachment of the Bolivian army. Guevara was wounded, captured, and executed the next day.

Born in Argentina, Guevara believed that a man of action could revolutionize a people. He played a pivotal role in the Cuban Revolution of 1956-59 and encouraged Fidel Castro to pursue his communist, anti-American agenda. After holding several positions in Castro's government, he disappeared from Cuba in 1965. He secretly traveled to the Congo, where he trained rebels, and in 1966 resurfaced in Bolivia as leader of another guerrilla group. Since his death, Guevara has been idolized as a hero of leftist Third World revolution.



Oct 8, 1957:
Jerry Lee Lewis records "Great Balls Of Fire" in Memphis, Tennessee

Jerry Lee Lewis was not the only early rock-and-roller from a strict Christian background who struggled to reconcile his religious beliefs with the moral implications of the music he created. He may have been the only one to have one of his religious crises caught on tape, however—in between takes on one of his legendary hit songs. It was on October 8, 1957, that bible-school dropout Jerry Lee Lewis laid down the definitive version of "Great Balls Of Fire," amidst a losing battle with his conscience and with the legendary Sam Phillips, head of Sun Records.

Jerry Lee Lewis had first made his way to Sun Records in September 1956, hoping to catch his big break in the same Memphis recording studio where Elvis had caught his. The result of Lewis' first session, in November 1956, was the minor hit "Crazy Arms," but six months later, he and Phillips struck gold with "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On," a million-selling smash. Lewis's signature piano-pounding style and electric stage presence made him an instantaneous star, but stardom didn't quiet the doubts that his upbringing in the Assemblies of God church had given him about rock and roll. Those doubts would be on open display when he went back to the studio on this day in 1957.

It was hours into the "Great Balls Of Fire" session when Jerry Lee began arguing with Sam Phillips that the song was too sinful for him to record. As the two talked loudly over each other, Phillips pleaded with Lewis to believe that his music could actually be a force for moral good.

Phillips: "You can save souls!"

Lewis: "No, no, no, no!"

Phillips: "YES!"

Lewis: "How can the devil save souls?...I got the devil in me!

Jerry Lee somehow made peace with the conflict over the course of the next hour, becoming comfortable enough to begin making various unprintable statements on his way to saying with enthusiasm, "You ready to cut it? You ready to go?" just before launching into the take that would soon become his second smash-hit single.

Jerry Lee Lewis' moral struggles would continue throughout a storied career that would never quite recover from the 1958 disclosure of his marriage to a 13-year-old cousin. At the peak of his powers following "Great Balls Of Fire," however, he was a figure as magnetic as any in rock-and-roll history. As the producer Don Dixon would later say in an NPR interview, "Little Richard was fun, Elvis was cool, but Jerry Lee Lewis was frightening."

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 9, 1992:
Meteorite crashes into Chevy Malibu

On this day in 1992, 18-year-old Michelle Knapp is watching television in her parents' living room in Peekskill, New York when she hears a thunderous crash in the driveway. Alarmed, Knapp ran outside to investigate. What she found was startling, to say the least: a sizeable hole in the rear end of her car, an orange 1980 Chevy Malibu; a matching hole in the gravel driveway underneath the car; and in the hole, the culprit: what looked like an ordinary, bowling-ball–sized rock. It was extremely heavy for its size (it weighed about 28 pounds), shaped like a football and warm to the touch; also, it smelled vaguely of rotten eggs. The next day, a curator from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City confirmed that the object was a genuine meteorite.

Scientists estimate that the Earth is bombarded with about 100 pounds of meteoric material every day. Meteorites are pieces of asteroids and other debris made of rock, iron and nickel that have been orbiting in space for billions of years. Some are as tiny as dust particles and others are as huge as 10 miles across; most, however, are about the size of a baseball. Astronomers and other people who pay attention to the night sky can easily see them: When a meteorite enters the Earth's atmosphere, it blazes across the sky like a fireball. (What most people call "shooting stars" are actually meteorites.) Thousands of people in the eastern United States saw the greenish Peekskill meteorite as it streaked toward Knapp's Malibu and many heard it too: one witness said that it crackled like a very loud sparkler. Scientists have determined that it came from the inner edge of the main asteroid belt in space, between Jupiter and Mars.

While meteorites are fairly common, a meteorite hitting a car is not: A car is, after all, a very small object on a very large planet. In fact, as far as scientists know it has only happened twice before--once in Illinois during the 1930s and once in St. Louis. Eventually, the famous Knapp meteorite was sold to a collector and two fossil dealers, who broke it into smaller chunks and sold those to a handful of other collectors and museums. The car, meanwhile, sold for $10,000 to Lang's Fossils and Meteorites in Cranford, New Jersey. It has been on display in New York, Paris, Munich and Tokyo.



Oct 9, 1963:
Landslide kills thousands in Italy

On this day in 1963, a landslide in Italy leads to the deaths of more than 2,000 people when it causes a sudden and massive wave of water to overwhelm a dam.

The Diga del Vajont dam was built in the Vaiont Gorge to supply hydroelectric power to Northern Italy. Located 10 miles northeast of Belluno, it rose 875 feet above the Piave River below and was a full 75 feet wide at its base. The construction of the dam created a large reservoir, which held more than 300,000 cubic feet of water. While the dam was solidly constructed, its location was a poor choice.

The Vaiont Gorge was located in a section of the Alps known for instability. In 1963, the area experienced heavy rains—about 90 inches by October 9. At 10:41 p.m., the wet land could no longer hold and a massive landslide came crashing down from Mount Toc, causing a huge pile of dirt and rocks to plunge into the reservoir at about 70 miles per hour. The impact of the debris caused an immense wave of water to rise as high as 300 feet above the level of the dam.

Workers living alongside the dam were killed instantly. The displaced water crashed over the dam and into the Piave River below. It stormed down the river and engulfed the town of Longarone. Within minutes the town had virtually vanished and nearly 2,000 people were dead. The tsunami-like wave then rushed down to San Martino, where it killed hundreds more.

In the aftermath of the disaster, Mario Pancini, the engineer of the dam project, was summoned to court to answer questions regarding what was known of the geology of the area prior to the dam's construction. He killed himself before his scheduled appearance.



Oct 9, 1975:
Sakharov wins Peace Prize

Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov, the Soviet physicist who helped build the USSR's first hydrogen bomb, is awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of his struggle against "the abuse of power and violations of human dignity in all its forms." Sakharov was forbidden by the Soviet government from personally traveling to Oslo, Norway, to accept the award.

Born in Moscow in 1921, Sakharov studied physics at Moscow University and in June 1948 was recruited into the Soviet nuclear weapons program. In 1948, after detonating their first atomic bomb, the Soviets joined the United States in the race to develop the hydrogen bomb, a weapon theorized to be dozens of times more powerful than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sakharov's concept of the "Layer Cake" bomb showed some promising results, but in late 1952 the Americans successfully detonated the world's first "super bomb." The Soviet team rushed to catch up and, with the aid of Soviet espionage, settled on the same winning concept as the Americans--radiation implosion. On November 22, 1955, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its first hydrogen bomb.

Although Sakharov was decorated with numerous Soviet scientific honors for his achievement, the scientist became increasingly concerned with the implications of the terrifying weapon, and he later regretted his part in its creation. In 1957, his concern about the biological hazards of nuclear testing inspired him to write a damning article about the effects of low-level radiation, and he called for the cessation of nuclear tests. The Soviet government kept his criticism quiet until 1969, when an essay Sakharov wrote was smuggled out of the country and published in The New York Times. In the essay, he attacked the arms race and the Soviet political system and called for a "democratic, pluralistic society free of intolerance and dogmatism, a humanitarian society that would care for the Earth and its future."

Following the publication of his essay, Sakharov was fired from the weapons program and became a vocal advocate of human rights. In 1975, he was the first Soviet to win the Nobel Peace Prize. After he denounced the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Soviet authorities were quick to respond, exiling him to Gorky, where he lived in difficult conditions. In December 1986, Sakharov's exile ended when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev invited him to return to Moscow. He was subsequently elected to the Congress of People's Deputies as a democratic reformer and appointed to the commission responsible for drafting a new Soviet constitution. Sakharov died in 1989.



Oct 9, 1976:
Disco/Classical hybrid "A Fifth Of Beethoven" is the #1 song on the U.S. pop charts

The first academically trained multi-instrumentalist ever to set the nation's disco dance floors on fire, Walter Murphy turned his knowledge of the classical repertoire and his commercial ambitions into a smash-hit record called "A Fifth Of Beethoven," which reached the top of the Billboard pop chart on this day in 1976.

Walter Murphy took his musical training further than most, studying jazz and classical piano at the Manhattan School of Music before setting out on a career as a commercial jingle-writer in the early 1970s. Both aspects of his experience would come into play in achieving pop stardom. Murphy's acumen in spotting a potential trend is what gave him the idea to create his masterpiece. Apparently inspired by the success of The Toys' 1965 adaptation of a Bach minuet into a minor pop hit called "A Lover's Concerto," Murphy booked himself some studio time and set about trying to craft a hit of his own by "disco-fying" the classics. Playing all the instruments himself, Murphy recorded a variety of samples on a demo tape and circulated it among New York record labels, receiving only one response, from Private Stock Records. With Private Stock's blessing, Murphy adapted Ludwig Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C Minor into "A Fifth Of Beethoven," which was released in the spring of 1976 under the name Walter Murphy & The Big Apple Band.

"A Fifth Of Beethoven" took both Murphy and his label by surprise by rocketing up the charts to the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1976. As great a success as that was for Walter Murphy, his record had an even bigger second life after its initial fall from the pop charts when it was selected for use in the film Saturday Night Fever and on the multi-platinum Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album.

Follow-up disco singles by Walter Murphy based on works by Rimsky-Korsakov and George Gershwin failed to repeat the success of "A Fifth Of Beethoven." Murphy continues to have a successful career in commercial music, however, with his most recent significant credit coming as the composer of the theme song from television's animated series Family Guy.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 10, 1985:
Achille Lauro hijacking ends

The hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro reaches a dramatic climax when U.S. Navy F-14 fighters intercept an Egyptian airliner attempting to fly the Palestinian hijackers to freedom and force the jet to land at a NATO base in Sigonella, Sicily. American and Italian troops surrounded the plane, and the terrorists were taken into Italian custody.

On October 7, four heavily armed Palestinian terrorists hijacked the Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. Some 320 crewmembers and 80 passengers, were taken hostage. Hundreds of other passengers had disembarked the cruise ship earlier that day to visit Cairo and tour the Egyptian pyramids. Identifying themselves as members of the Palestine Liberation Front--a Palestinian splinter group--the gunmen demanded the release of 50 Palestinian militants imprisoned in Israel. If their demands were not met, they threatened to blow up the ship and kill the 11 Americans on board. The next morning, they also threatened to kill the British passengers.

The Achille Lauro traveled to the Syrian port of Tartus, where the terrorists demanded negotiations on October 8. Syria refused to permit the ship to anchor in its waters, which prompted more threats from the hijackers. That afternoon, they shot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish-American who was confined to a wheelchair as the result of a stroke. His body was then pushed overboard in the wheelchair.

Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization condemned the hijacking, and PLO officials joined with Egyptian authorities in attempting to resolve the crisis. On the recommendation of the negotiators, the cruise ship traveled to Port Said. On October 9, the hijackers surrendered to Egyptian authorities and freed the hostages in exchange for a pledge of safe passage to an undisclosed destination.

The next day--October 10--the four hijackers boarded an EgyptAir Boeing 737 airliner, along with Mohammed Abbas, a member of the Palestine Liberation Front who had participated in the negotiations; a PLO official; and several Egyptians. The 737 took off from Cairo at 4:15 p.m. EST and headed for Tunisia. President Ronald Reagan gave his final order approving the plan to intercept the aircraft, and at 5:30 p.m. EST, F-14 Tomcat fighters located the airliner 80 miles south of Crete. Without announcing themselves, the F-14s trailed the airliner as it sought and was denied permission to land at Tunis. After a request to land at the Athens airport was likewise refused, the F-14s turned on their lights and flew wing-to-wing with the airliner. The aircraft was ordered to land at a NATO air base in Sicily, and the pilot complied, touching down at 6:45 p.m. The hijackers were arrested soon after. Abbas and the other Palestinian were released, prompting criticism from the United States, which wanted to investigate their possible involvement in the hijacking.

On July 10, 1986, an Italian court later convicted three of the terrorists and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from 15 to 30 years. Three others, including Mohammed Abbas, were convicted in absentia for masterminding the hijacking and sentenced to life in prison. They received harsher penalties because, unlike the hijackers, who the court found were acting for "patriotic motives," Abbas and the others conceived the hijacking as a "selfish political act" designed "to weaken the leadership of Yasir Arafat." The fourth hijacker was a minor who was tried and convicted separately.



Oct 10, 732:
Battle of Tours

At the Battle of Tours near Poitiers, France, Frankish leader Charles Martel, a Christian, defeats a large army of Spanish Moors, halting the Muslim advance into Western Europe. Abd-ar-Rahman, the Muslim governor of Cordoba, was killed in the fighting, and the Moors retreated from Gaul, never to return in such force.

Charles was the illegitimate son of Pepin, the powerful mayor of the palace of Austrasia and effective ruler of the Frankish kingdom. After Pepin died in 714 (with no surviving legitimate sons), Charles beat out Pepin's three grandsons in a power struggle and became mayor of the Franks. He expanded the Frankish territory under his control and in 732 repulsed an onslaught by the Muslims.

Victory at Tours ensured the ruling dynasty of Martel's family, the Carolingians. His son Pepin became the first Carolingian king of the Franks, and his grandson Charlemagne carved out a vast empire that stretched across Europe.



Oct 10, 1845:
Birth of the U.S. Naval Academy

The United States Naval Academy opens in Annapolis, Maryland, with 50 midshipmen students and seven professors. Known as the Naval School until 1850, the curriculum included mathematics and navigation, gunnery and steam, chemistry, English, natural philosophy, and French. The Naval School officially became the U.S. Naval Academy in 1850, and a new curriculum went into effect, requiring midshipmen to study at the academy for four years and to train aboard ships each summer--the basic format that remains at the academy to this day.



Oct 10, 1973:
Vice President Agnew resigns

Less than a year before Richard M. Nixon's resignation as president of the United States, Spiro Agnew becomes the first U.S. vice president to resign in disgrace. The same day, he pleaded no contest to a charge of federal income tax evasion in exchange for the dropping of charges of political corruption. He was subsequently fined $10,000, sentenced to three years probation, and disbarred by the Maryland court of appeals.

Agnew, a Republican, was elected chief executive of Baltimore County in 1961. In 1967, he became governor of Maryland, an office he held until his nomination as the Republican vice presidential candidate in 1968. During Nixon's successful campaign, Agnew ran on a tough law-and-order platform, and as vice president he frequently attacked opponents of the Vietnam War and liberals as being disloyal and un-American. Reelected with Nixon in 1972, Agnew resigned on October 10, 1973, after the U.S. Justice Department uncovered widespread evidence of his political corruption, including allegations that his practice of accepting bribes had continued into his tenure as U.S. vice president. He died at the age of 77 on September 17, 1996.

Under the process decreed by the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, President Nixon was instructed to the fill vacant office of vice president by nominating a candidate who then had to be approved by both houses of Congress. Nixon's appointment of Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan was approved by Congress and, on December 6, Ford was sworn in. He became the 38th president of the United States on August 9, 1974, after the escalating Watergate affair caused Nixon to resign.



Oct 10, 1935:
Porgy and Bess, the first great American opera, premieres on Broadway

On October 10, 1935, George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess premieres on Broadway.

Porgy and Bess began its journey to the Broadway stage in 1936, when George Gershwin wrote a letter late one night to the author of a book he was reading proposing that the two of them collaborate on an operatic adaptation. The African-American poet DuBose Heyward, author of the novel Porgy, immediately agreed to Gershwin's proposal, but commercial commitments in New York prevented Gershwin from actually beginning work on the project for another seven years. In the meantime, singer Al Jolson attempted to mount a musical version of Porgy starring himself in blackface, but that effort foundered in 1932, leaving the way open for the Gershwin-Heyward collaboration that would feature an all-African American cast of classically trained singers—revolutionary casting in 1930s America.

Over the course of more than two years beginning in the spring of 1933, DuBose Heyward and the two Gershwins—George's brother, Ira, joined on as co-lyricist in 1934—collaborated mostly by U.S. Mail, with only occasional face-to-face meetings. In this fashion, they nevertheless managed to create some of the greatest songs in American musical-theater history, including "Summertime," "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'," "It Ain't Necessarily So" and "Bess, You Is My Woman Now."

The critics of the day were decidedly mixed in their reception of Porgy and Bess, however. While Olin Downes of The New York Times found "much to commend it from the musical standpoint," composer/critic Virgil Thomson, writing for the New York Herald-Tribune, was less kind, calling Gershwin's incorporation of blues and jazz influences into a "serious" operatic score to be "falsely conceived and rather clumsily executed...crooked folklore and half-way opera."

Many of the songs had been cut from show between its trial run in Boston and its Broadway debut, however—a fact that may well have hurt Porgy and Bess with critics. In fact, the full George Gershwin score of Porgy and Bess would not be performed again until a triumphant 1976 revival by the Houston Grand Opera helped establish its current place in the standard operatic repertoire.

George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward died in 1937 and 1940, respectively, not knowing that the poorly-received Porgy and Bess, which premiered on this day in 1925 and closed some four months later, would later gain recognition as one of the most important American musical works of the 20th century.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 11, 2002:
Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Prize

On this day in 2002, former President Jimmy Carter wins the Nobel Peace Prize "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."

Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, served one term as U.S. president between 1977 and 1981. One of his key achievements as president was mediating the peace talks between Israel and Egypt in 1978. The Nobel Committee had wanted to give Carter (1924- ) the prize that year for his efforts, along with Anwar Sadat and Menachim Begin, but was prevented from doing so by a technicality--he had not been nominated by the official deadline.

After he left office, Carter and his wife Rosalynn created the Atlanta-based Carter Center in 1982 to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering. Since 1984, they have worked with Habitat for Humanity to build homes and raise awareness of homelessness. Among his many accomplishments, Carter has helped to fight disease and improve economic growth in developing nations and has served as an observer at numerous political elections around the world.

The first Nobel Prizes--awards established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) in his will--were handed out in Sweden in 1901 in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. The Nobel Prize in economics was first awarded in 1969. Carter was the third U.S. president to receive the award, worth $1 million, following Theodore Roosevelt (1906) and Woodrow Wilson (1919).



Oct 11, 1986:
Reagan and Gorbachev meet in Reykjavik

Following up on their successful November 1985 summit meeting in Geneva, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, to continue discussions about curbing their intermediate missile arsenals in Europe. Just when it appeared that agreement might be reached, the talks fell apart amid accusations and recriminations, and U.S.-Soviet relations took a giant step backwards.

The sticking point arose when Gorbachev requested that the talks concerning the missiles be expanded to include limitations on America's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Referred to as the "Star Wars" initiative by opponents, SDI was one of Reagan's pet projects. A multi-billion-dollar program, SDI was supposed to use space technology to provide a "shield" from nuclear attacks. Not surprisingly, Reagan refused to consider Gorbachev's suggestion, and the talks ended the next day, October 12, with no agreement in hand. Reagan charged the Soviet leader with bad faith in trying to expand the parameters of the talks; back in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev reported that Reagan seemed to be lying about his desire for serious negotiations concerning arms limitations. Talks on the missile issue did not resume until December 1987, when the two leaders met for a third summit in Washington, and Gorbachev dropped his insistence on including SDI in the negotiations.



Oct 11, 1962:
Pope opens Vatican II

Pope John XXIII convenes an ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church—the first in 92 years. In summoning the ecumenical council—a general meeting of the bishops of the church—the pope hoped to bring spiritual rebirth to Catholicism and cultivate greater unity with the other branches of Christianity.

Pope John reached the papacy from simple, peasant beginnings. Born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli in 1881, he was the son of an Italian tenant farmer. He was ordained a priest in 1904, and worked as a professor, part-time historian, biographer, and diplomat. For the first 54 years of his church career he was known as a good-natured conformist who obediently followed orders, and this reputation had more to do with his steady rise than did his intellectual abilities. As papal envoy to Turkey during World War II, he saved thousands of Jewish lives by helping arrange their escape to Palestine.

Roncalli's first high-profile post came in 1944, when he was named papal nuncio to Charles de Gaulle's newly liberated France. It was a delicate post; Roncalli's predecessor had collaborated with France's Vichy government, leading to a post-occupation backlash against the Catholic leadership in France. Roncalli carried out the assignment with grace and in 1953 was made a cardinal.

Although he was popular, few imagined he would ever be elected pope. After Pope Pius XII died in 1958, however, Roncalli was elected leader of the Roman Catholic Church on the 12th ballot. At 77 years of age, he was regarded as an "interim" pope by the Vatican Curia, someone who would follow the status quo for a few years while a younger prelate was bred to succeed him. However, Pope John XXIII soon surprised the Vatican's conservative leadership by taking steps to modernize the church. He met with political and religious leaders from around the world and was the first modern pope to travel freely in Rome, breaking with the tradition that made the pope a "prisoner of the Vatican." He had a warm personality, and spoke with peasants as freely as he did with the foreign dignitaries he invited to Rome. Adored by the Catholic masses, he gradually became a kind of father figure for Catholics around the world.

The high point of his reign was the Second Vatican Council, nicknamed Vatican II, which opened on October 11, 1962. In calling the ecumenical council, he sought a "New Pentecost," a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit. He sought reconciliation for the world's divided Christianity and invited Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant observers to attend the proceedings. Pope John XXIII died in June 1963, but the council continued under his successor, Paul VI, until 1965. That year, Pope Paul began the process that could lead to John XXIII's canonization as a saint. In 2000, Pope John Paul II beatified John XXIII, bringing him a step closer to sainthood.

Pope John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, and was succeeded by Pope Benedict XVI on April 19, 2005. Proceedures are under way to one day grant him Sainthood.



Oct 11, 1968:
Apollo 7 launched

Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, is launched with astronauts Walter M. Schirra, Jr.; Donn F. Eisele; and Walter Cunningham aboard. Under the command of Schirra, the crew of Apollo 7 conducted an 11-day orbit of Earth, during which the crew transmitted the first live television broadcasts from orbit.



Oct 11, 1975:
Bruce Springsteen scores his first pop hit with "Born to Run"

By 1975, 26-year-old Bruce Springsteen had two heavily promoted major-label albums behind him, but nothing approaching a popular hit. Tapped by Columbia Records as the Next Big Thing back in 1973, he'd been marketed first as the "New Dylan" and then as America's new "Street Poet," but unless you were a rock-journalism junkie or had been witness to one of his raucous three-hour live shows in an East Coast rock club, you'd probably never bought one of his records or even heard his name. That would all change soon, however, for the poet laureate of the Jersey Shore. On this day in 1975, the epic single "Born to Run" became Bruce Springsteen's first-ever Top 40 hit, marking the start of his eventual transition from little-known cult figure to international superstar.

Born in 1949, in Long Branch, New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen grew up during the golden age of American rock and roll, and it was his devotion to the music of that era that marked him as a breath of fresh air during his rise to fame in the early 1970s. Writing for Rolling Stone magazine in 1973, the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs said of Springsteen, "He sort of catarrh-mumbles his ditties in a disgruntled mushmouth sorta like Robbie Robertson on Quaaludes with Dylan barfing down the back of his neck." That was in a positive review of Springsteen's debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park—the first of many positive reviews to come during the legend-building phase of his career. In 1974, a Rolling Stone editor named Jon Landau, writing in Boston's Real Paper bestowed this now-famous praise upon the Boss: "I saw rock and roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." One year later, Landau would co-produce Springsteen's third album and eventually take over management of his career.

That third album was to be Springsteen's breakthrough and an American classic, Born to Run, which another giant of rock criticism, Greil Marcus, likened to "a '57 Chevy running on melted down Crystals records." While "Thunder Road" and "Backstreets" from the same album may be as beloved among devoted fans as the title track, it was the Phil Spector-inspired "Born to Run" that was the first exposure most Americans got to Bruce Springsteen. Its ascent into the Top 40 on this day in 1975 was followed less than two weeks later by simultaneous cover articles for Springsteen in Time and Newsweek magazines.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 12, 1492:
Columbus reaches the New World

After sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sights a Bahamian island, believing he has reached East Asia. His expedition went ashore the same day and claimed the land for Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, who sponsored his attempt to find a western ocean route to China, India, and the fabled gold and spice islands of Asia.

Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451. Little is known of his early life, but he worked as a seaman and then a maritime entrepreneur. He became obsessed with the possibility of pioneering a western sea route to Cathay (China), India, and the gold and spice islands of Asia. At the time, Europeans knew no direct sea route to southern Asia, and the route via Egypt and the Red Sea was closed to Europeans by the Ottoman Empire, as were many land routes. Contrary to popular legend, educated Europeans of Columbus' day did believe that the world was round, as argued by St. Isidore in the seventh century. However, Columbus, and most others, underestimated the world's size, calculating that East Asia must lie approximately where North America sits on the globe (they did not yet know that the Pacific Ocean existed).

With only the Atlantic Ocean, he thought, lying between Europe and the riches of the East Indies, Columbus met with King John II of Portugal and tried to persuade him to back his "Enterprise of the Indies," as he called his plan. He was rebuffed and went to Spain, where he was also rejected at least twice by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. However, after the Spanish conquest of the Moorish kingdom of Granada in January 1492, the Spanish monarchs, flush with victory, agreed to support his voyage.

On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with three small ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina. On October 12, the expedition reached land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas. Later that month, Columbus sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought might be Japan. He established a small colony there with 39 of his men. The explorer returned to Spain with gold, spices, and "Indian" captives in March 1493 and was received with the highest honors by the Spanish court. He was the first European to explore the Americas since the Vikings set up colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland in the 10th century.

During his lifetime, Columbus led a total of four expeditions to the New World, discovering various Caribbean islands, the Gulf of Mexico, and the South and Central American mainlands, but he never accomplished his original goal—a western ocean route to the great cities of Asia. Columbus died in Spain in 1506 without realizing the great scope of what he did achieve: He had discovered for Europe the New World, whose riches over the next century would help make Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.



Oct 12, 1810:
The origin of Oktoberfest

Bavarian Crown Prince Louis, later King Louis I of Bavaria, marries Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen. The Bavarian royalty invited the citizens of Munich to attend the festivities, held on the fields in front of the city gates. These famous public fields were named Theresienwiese—"Therese's fields"—in honor of the crown princess; although locals have since abbreviated the name simply to the "Wies'n." Horse races in the presence of the royal family concluded the popular event, celebrated in varying forms all across Bavaria.

The decision to repeat the festivities and the horse races in the subsequent year gave rise to the tradition of the annual Oktoberfest, which now begins in late September and lasts until the first Sunday in October. Alcohol consumption is an important part of the modern festival, and more than 1 million gallons of beer are consumed annually at Oktoberfest.



Oct 12, 1945:
Conscientious objector wins Medal of Honor

Private First Class Desmond T. Doss of Lynchburg, Virginia, is presented the Congressional Medal of Honor for outstanding bravery as a medical corpsman, the first conscientious objector in American history to receive the nation's highest military award.

When called on by his country to fight in World War II, Doss, a dedicated pacifist, registered as a conscientious objector. Eventually sent to the Pacific theater of war as a medical corpsman, Doss voluntarily put his life in the utmost peril during the bloody battle for Okinawa, saving dozens of lives well beyond the call of duty.



Oct 12, 1964:
USSR leads the space race

The Soviet Union launches Voskhod 1 into orbit around Earth, with cosmonauts Vladamir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov aboard. Voskhod 1 was the first spacecraft to carry a multi-person crew, and the two-day mission was also the first flight performed without space suits.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. space program consistently trailed the Soviet program in space firsts, a pattern that drastically shifted with the triumph of the U.S. lunar program in the late 1960s and early 1970s.



Oct 12, 1997:
John Denver dies in an aircraft accident

To those who bought records like "Rocky Mountain High" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads" by the millions in the 1970s, John Denver was much more than just a great songwriter and performer. With his oversized glasses, bowl haircut and down vest, he was an unlikely fashion icon, and with his vocal environmentalism, he was the living embodiment of an outdoorsy lifestyle that many 20-something baby boomers would adopt as their own during the "Me" decade. There never was and there probably never will be a star quite like John Denver, who died on this day in 1997 when his experimental amateur aircraft crashed into Monterey Bay on the California coast.

Born Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr., in 1943, not in the mountains of Colorado but in Roswell, New Mexico, John Denver rose to fame as a recording artist in 1971, when "Take Me Home, Country Roads" rose all the way to #2 on the Billboard pop chart. In fact, Denver already had a share in a #1 hit as the writer of "Leaving On A Jet Plane," a chart-topper for Peter, Paul and Mary in 1969. But it was his 1971 breakout as a performer of his own material that made him a household name. Over the course of the 1970s, John Denver earned five more top-10 singles, including the #1 hits "Sunshine On My Shoulders" (1974), "Annie's Song" (1974), "Thank God I'm A Country Boy" (1975) and "I'm Sorry" (1975). Even more impressive, he released an astonishing 11 albums that were certified Platinum by the RIAA, making him one of the most successful recording artists of the 70s, and launching him into a successful career in film and television as well.

By the 1990s, Denver was still a popular touring musician, though he was no longer recording new material with significant commercial success. Over the course of his career, he had become an accomplished private pilot with more than 2,700 hours on various single- and multi-engine aircraft, with both an instrument and a Lear Jet rating. On October 12, 1997, however, he was flying an aircraft with which he was relatively unfamiliar, and with which he had previously experienced control problems, according to a later investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. At approximately 5:30 pm local time, after a smooth takeoff from a Pacific Grove airfield and under ideal flying conditions, Denver apparently lost control of his Long-EZ aircraft several hundred feet over Monterey Bay, leading to the fatal crash.

A movie star and political activist as well as a musician, John Denver was one of the biggest stars of his generation, and is credited by the Recording Industry Association of America with selling more than 32 million albums in the United States alone.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 13, 1792:
White House cornerstone laid

The cornerstone is laid for a presidential residence in the newly designated capital city of Washington. In 1800, President John Adams became the first president to reside in the executive mansion, which soon became known as the "White House" because its white-gray Virginia freestone contrasted strikingly with the red brick of nearby buildings.

The city of Washington was created to replace Philadelphia as the nation's capital because of its geographical position in the center of the existing new republic. The states of Maryland and Virginia ceded land around the Potomac River to form the District of Columbia, and work began on Washington in 1791. French architect Charles L'Enfant designed the area's radical layout, full of dozens of circles, crisscross avenues, and plentiful parks. In 1792, work began on the neoclassical White House building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue under the guidance of Irish American architect James Hoban, whose design was influenced by Leinster House in Dublin and by a building sketch in James Gibbs' Book of Architecture. President George Washington chose the site.

On November 1, President John Adams was welcomed into the executive mansion. His wife, Abigail, wrote about their new home: "I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house, and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but wise men ever rule under this roof!"

In 1814, during the War of 1812, the White House was set on fire along with the U.S. Capitol by British soldiers in retaliation for the burning of government buildings in Canada by U.S. troops. The burned-out building was subsequently rebuilt and enlarged under the direction of James Hoban, who added east and west terraces to the main building, along with a semicircular south portico and a colonnaded north portico. The smoke-stained stone walls were painted white. Work was completed on the White House in the 1820s.

Major restoration occurred during the administration of President Harry Truman, and Truman lived across the street for several years in Blair House. Since 1995, Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Lafayette Square has been closed to vehicular traffic for security reasons. Today, more than a million tourists visit the White House annually. It is the oldest federal building in the nation's capital.



Oct 13, 1775:
Continental Congress authorizes first naval force

On this day in 1775, the Continental Congress authorizes construction and administration of the first American naval force—the precursor to the United States Navy.

Since the outbreak of open hostilities with the British in April, little consideration had been given to protection by sea until Congress received news that a British naval fleet was on its way. In November, the Continental Navy was formally organized, and on December 22, Esek Hopkins was appointed the first commander in chief of the Continental Navy. Congress also named four captains to the new service: Dudley Saltonstall, Abraham Whipple, Nicholas Biddle and John Burrows Hopkins. Their respective vessels, the 24-gun frigates Alfred and Columbus, the 14-gun brigs Andrew Doria and Cabot, as well as three schooners, the Hornet, the Wasp and the Fly, became the first ships of the Navy’s fleet. Five first lieutenants, including future American hero John Paul Jones, five second lieutenants and three third lieutenants also received their commissions.

Admiral Hopkins, as he was dubbed by George Washington, was first tasked with assessing the feasibility of an attack on British naval forces in the Chesapeake Bay. After sailing south with his meager force of eight ships, Hopkins decided that victory in such an encounter was impossible. He sailed to the Bahamas instead, where he attacked the British port of Nassau, a decision for which he was relieved of his command upon returning to the continent.

During the American Revolution, the Continental Navy successfully preyed on British merchant shipping and won several victories over British warships. This first naval force was disbanded after the war. What is now known as the United States Navy was formally established with the creation of the federal Department of the Navy in April 1798.



Oct 13, 2010:
Chilean miners are rescued after 69 days underground

On this day in 2010, the last of 33 miners trapped nearly half a mile underground for more than two months at a caved-in mine in northern Chile, are rescued. The miners survived longer than anyone else trapped underground in recorded history.

The miners’ ordeal began on August 5, 2010, when the San Jose gold and copper mine where they were working, some 500 miles north of the Chilean capital city of Santiago, collapsed. The 33 men moved to an underground emergency shelter area, where they discovered just several days’ worth of food rations. As their situation grew more desperate over the next 17 days, the miners, uncertain if anyone would find them, considered suicide and cannibalism. Then, on August 22, a drill sent by rescuers broke through to the area where the miners were located, and the men sent back up a note saying, “We are fine in the refuge, the 33.”
Food, water, letters, medicine and other supplies were soon delivered to the miners via a narrow bore hole. Video cameras were also sent down, making it possible for rescuers to see the men and the hot, humid space in which they were entombed. As engineering and mining experts from around the world collaborated on the long, complex process of devising a way to bring the 33 men up to the surface, the miners maintained a system of jobs and routines in order to keep up morale.

Rescuers eventually drilled and reinforced an escape shaft wide enough to extract the men, one by one. (Employees of a Pennsylvania-based drilling-tool company played a role in drilling the rescue shaft.) On October 12, the first of the miners was raised to the surface in a narrow, 13-foot-tall capsule painted white, blue and red, the colors of the Chilean flag. The approximately 2,000-foot ascent to the surface in the capsule took around 15 minutes for each man.

The miners were greeted by a cheering crowd that included Chile’s president, Sebastian Pinera; media from around the world; and friends and relatives, many of whom had been camped at the base of the mine in the Atacama Desert for months. Millions of people around the globe watched the rescue on live TV. Less than 24 hours after the operation began, all 33 of the miners, who ranged in age from 19 to 63, had been safely rescued. Almost all the men were in good health, and each of them sported dark glasses to protect their eyes after being in a dimly lit space for so long.

The rescued miners were later honored with trips to a variety of destinations, including England, Israel and Florida’s Walt Disney World, where a parade was held in their honor.



Oct 13, 1975:
Singer Charlie Rich protests John Denver's big win at the CMA Awards

In a 35-year career that ran from the rockabilly genius of "Lonely Weekends" (1960) to the Countrypolitan splendor of "Behind Closed Doors" (1973), the versatile and soulful Charlie Rich earned eleven #1 hits on the Country charts and one crossover smash with the #1 pop hit "The Most Beautiful Girl" (1973). The man they called the Silver Fox displayed a natural talent for pleasing many different audiences, but his non-singing performance before one particular audience in 1975 did significant damage to the remainder of his career. On this day in 1975, the man voted Entertainer of the Year for by the Country Music Association of America one year earlier stood onstage at the CMA awards show to announce that year's winner of the Association's biggest award. But a funny thing happened when he opened the envelope and saw what was written inside. Instead of merely reading the name "John Denver" and stepping back from the podium, Charlie Rich reached into his pocket for a cigarette lighter and set the envelope on fire, right there onstage. Though the display shocked the live audience in attendance, John Denver himself was present only via satellite linkup, and he offered a gracious acceptance speech with no idea what had occurred.

In the aftermath of the incident, Charlie Rich was blacklisted from the CMA awards show for the rest of his career. But what point was he trying to make, exactly? It was widely assumed at the time that Rich was taking a stand on the side of country traditionalists upset at a notable incursion of pop dabblers into country music at the time (Olivia Newton-John, for instance, had won the Most Promising Female Vocalist award in 1973, for instance). But Rich himself was often accused of being "not country enough," so that may not have been his intent. While it made better newspaper copy to suggest that he specifically resented John Denver's win, Rich was also, by his own admission, on a combination of prescription pain medication and gin-and-tonics that night.

As his son, Charlie Rich, Jr., has written of the incident, "He used bad judgment. He was human after all. I know the last thing my father would have wanted to do was set himself up as judge of another musician."

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 14, 1947:
Yeager breaks sound barrier

U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.

Yeager, born in Myra, West Virginia, in 1923, was a combat fighter during World War II and flew 64 missions over Europe. He shot down 13 German planes and was himself shot down over France, but he escaped capture with the assistance of the French Underground. After the war, he was among several volunteers chosen to test-fly the experimental X-1 rocket plane, built by the Bell Aircraft Company to explore the possibility of supersonic flight.

For years, many aviators believed that man was not meant to fly faster than the speed of sound, theorizing that transonic drag rise would tear any aircraft apart. All that changed on October 14, 1947, when Yeager flew the X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California. The X-1 was lifted to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 aircraft and then released through the bomb bay, rocketing to 40,000 feet and exceeding 662 miles per hour (the sound barrier at that altitude). The rocket plane, nicknamed "Glamorous Glennis," was designed with thin, unswept wings and a streamlined fuselage modeled after a .50-caliber bullet.

Because of the secrecy of the project, Bell and Yeager's achievement was not announced until June 1948. Yeager continued to serve as a test pilot, and in 1953 he flew 1,650 miles per hour in an X-1A rocket plane. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1975 with the rank of brigadier general.



Oct 14, 1962:
The Cuban Missile Crisis begins

The Cuban Missile Crisis begins on October 14, 1962, bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict. Photographs taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane offered incontrovertible evidence that Soviet-made medium-range missiles in Cuba—capable of carrying nuclear warheads—were now stationed 90 miles off the American coastline.

Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union over Cuba had been steadily increasing since the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in which Cuban refugees, armed and trained by the United States, landed in Cuba and attempted to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Though the invasion did not succeed, Castro was convinced that the United States would try again, and set out to get more military assistance from the Soviet Union. During the next year, the number of Soviet advisors in Cuba rose to more than 20,000. Rumors began that Russia was also moving missiles and strategic bombers onto the island. Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev may have decided to so dramatically up the stakes in the Cold War for several reasons. He may have believed that the United States was indeed going to invade Cuba and provided the weapons as a deterrent. Facing criticism at home from more hard-line members of the Soviet communist hierarchy, he may have thought a tough stand might win him support. Khrushchev also had always resented that U.S. nuclear missiles were stationed near the Soviet Union (in Turkey, for example), and putting missiles in Cuba might have been his way of redressing the imbalance. Two days after the pictures were taken, after being developed and analyzed by intelligence officers, they were presented to President Kennedy. During the next two weeks, the United States and the Soviet Union would come as close to nuclear war as they ever had, and a fearful world awaited the outcome.



Oct 14, 1912:
Theodore Roosevelt shot in Milwaukee

Roosevelt, who suffered only a flesh wound from the attack, went on to deliver his scheduled speech with the bullet still in his body. After a few words, the former "Rough Rider" pulled the torn and bloodstained manuscript from his breast pocket and declared, "You see, it takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose." He spoke for nearly an hour and then was rushed to the hospital.

Despite his vigorous campaign, Roosevelt, who served as the 26th U.S. president from 1901 to 1909, was defeated by Democrat Woodrow Wilson in November. Shrank was deemed insane and committed to a mental hospital, where he died in 1943.



Oct 14, 1964:
King wins Nobel Peace Prize

African American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial prejudice in America. At 35 years of age, the Georgia-born minister was the youngest person ever to receive the award.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister. He received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 organized the first major protest of the civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated nonviolent civil disobedience to racial segregation. The peaceful protests he led throughout the American South were often met with violence, but King and his followers persisted, and their nonviolent movement gained momentum.

A powerful orator, he appealed to Christian and American ideals and won growing support from the federal government and northern whites. In 1963, he led his massive March on Washington, in which he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" address. In 1964, the civil rights movement achieved two of its greatest successes: the ratification of the 24th Amendment, which abolished the poll tax, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public facilities. In October of that year, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He donated the prize money, valued at $54,600, to the civil rights movement.

In the late 1960s, King openly criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam and turned his efforts to winning economic rights for poor Americans. By that time, the civil rights movement had begun to fracture, with activists such as Stokely Carmichael rejecting King's vision of nonviolent integration in favor of African American self-reliance and self-defense. In 1968, King intended to revive his movement through an interracial "Poor People's March" on Washington, but on April 4 he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, by escaped white convict James Earl Ray, just a few weeks before the demonstration was scheduled to begin.



Oct 14, 1957:
"Wake Up Little Susie" becomes the Everly Brothers' first #1 hit

Harmony singing was a part of rock and roll right from the beginning, but the three- and four-part harmonies of doo-wop, derived from black gospel and blues traditions, would never have given us Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles or the Byrds. To get those groups, you first had to have the Everly Brothers, whose ringing, close-harmony style introduced a whole new sound into the rock-and-roll vocabulary: the sound of Appalachia set to hard-driving acoustic guitars and a subtle backbeat rhythm. One of the most important and influential groups in the history of rock and roll, the Everly Brothers burst onto the music scene in 1957 with their first big hit, "Bye Bye Love," which was quickly followed with their first #1 song, "Wake Up Little Susie," which topped the Billboard pop chart on this day in 1957.

Don and Phil Everly began performing together professionally in 1945 at the ages of eight and six, respectively, on their family's live radio show out of Shenandoah, Iowa. The Everly family resettled to Knoxville, Tennesee, in 1953, and two years later, 18-year-old Don and 16-year-old Phil began pursuing work as songwriters in Nashville. As a songwriting duo, they had very little success, and in their first try at making a record of their own, they couldn't even crack the lowest level of the Country & Western chart. A move to Cadence Records in 1957, however, changed the course of the Everly Brothers' career, bringing them into partnership with a production team that included legendary session man Chet Atkins and the songwriting team of Felice and Boudreaux Bryant.

"Bye Bye Love" was the first song by the Bryants to be recorded by the Everlys, establishing their trademark sound and peaking at #2 on the charts in the summer of 1957. The follow-up single, "Wake Up Little Susie," reached the top spot on October 14, 1957, though not without stirring controversy in some parts due to lyrics that hinted at teenage sex. Literally banned in Boston at one point, the Everlys' first chart-topper was taken at face value in most parts of the country as an insanely catchy song about two teenagers who have innocently fallen asleep at a movie only to awaken at 4:00 AM in fear of having ruined their good reputations.

The Everly Brothers would earn 25 top-40 hits over the first five years of their hugely influential recording career, including two more #1s: "All I Have To Do Is Dream" (1958) and "Cathy's Clown" (1960).

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 15, 1917:
Mata Hari executed

Mata Hari, the archetype of the seductive female spy, is executed for espionage by a French firing squad at Vincennes outside of Paris.

She first came to Paris in 1905 and found fame as a performer of exotic Asian-inspired dances. She soon began touring all over Europe, telling the story of how she was born in a sacred Indian temple and taught ancient dances by a priestess who gave her the name Mata Hari, meaning "eye of the day" in Malay. In reality, Mata Hari was born in a small town in northern Holland in 1876, and her real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. She acquired her superficial knowledge of Indian and Javanese dances when she lived for several years in Malaysia with her former husband, who was a Scot in the Dutch colonial army. Regardless of her authenticity, she packed dance halls and opera houses from Russia to France, mostly because her show consisted of her slowly stripping nude.

She became a famous courtesan, and with the outbreak of World War I her catalog of lovers began to include high-ranking military officers of various nationalities. In February 1917, French authorities arrested her for espionage and imprisoned her at St. Lazare Prison in Paris. In a military trial conducted in July, she was accused of revealing details of the Allies' new weapon, the tank, resulting in the deaths of thousands of soldiers. She was convicted and sentenced to death, and on October 15 she refused a blindfold and was shot to death by a firing squad at Vincennes.

There is some evidence that Mata Hari acted as a German spy, and for a time as a double agent for the French, but the Germans had written her off as an ineffective agent whose pillow talk had produced little intelligence of value. Her military trial was riddled with bias and circumstantial evidence, and it is probable that French authorities trumped her up as "the greatest woman spy of the century" as a distraction for the huge losses the French army was suffering on the western front. Her only real crimes may have been an elaborate stage fallacy and a weakness for men in uniform.




Oct 15, 1990:
Mikhail Gorbachev wins Nobel Peace Prize

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in ending Cold War tensions. Since coming to power in 1988, Gorbachev had undertaken to concentrate more effort and funds on his domestic reform plans by going to extraordinary lengths to reach foreign policy understandings with the noncommunist world.

Some of his accomplishments include four summits with President Ronald Reagan, including a 1987 meeting at which an agreement was reached to dismantle the U.S. and USSR intermediate-range missiles in Europe. He also began to remove Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1988 and exerted diplomatic pressure on Cuba and Vietnam to remove their forces from Angola and Kampuchea (Cambodia), respectively. In a 1989 meeting with President George Bush, Gorbachev declared that the Cold War was over.

Gorbachev also earned the respect of many in the West through his policy of non-intervention in the political upheavals that shook the Eastern European "satellite" nations during the late-1980s and early-1990s. When Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, and other Iron Curtain countries began to move toward more democratic political systems and free market economies, Gorbachev kept Soviet intervention in check. (This policy did not extend to the Soviet republics; similar efforts by Lithuania and other republics were met with stern warnings and force to keep the Soviet Socialist Republics together.)



Oct 15, 1945:
Vichy leader executed for treason

Pierre Laval, the puppet leader of Nazi-occupied Vichy France, is executed by firing squad for treason against France.

Laval, originally a deputy and senator of pacifist tendencies, shifted to the right in the 1930s while serving as minister of foreign affairs and twice as the French premier. A staunch anti-communist, he delayed the Soviet-Franco pact of 1935 and sought to align France with Fascist Italy. Hostile to the declaration of war against Germany in 1939, Laval encouraged the antiwar faction in the French government, and with the German invasion in 1940 he used his political influence to force an armistice with Germany. Henri Pétain took over the new Vichy state, and Laval served as minister of state. Laval was dismissed by PÉtain in December 1940 for negotiating privately with Germany.

By 1942, Laval had won the trust of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and the elderly Pétain became merely a figurehead in the Vichy regime. As the premier of Vichy France, Laval collaborated with the Nazi programs of oppression and genocide, and increasingly became a puppet of Hitler. After the Allied liberation of France, he was forced to flee east for German protection. With the defeat of Germany in May 1945, he escaped to Spain but was expelled and went into hiding in Austria, where he finally surrendered to American authorities in late July. Extradited to France, Laval was convicted of treason by the High Court of Justice in a sensational trial. Condemned to death, he attempted suicide by poison but was nursed back to health in time for his execution, on October 15, 1945.



Oct 15, 1930:
Duke Ellington records his first big hit, "Mood Indigo"

The legendary composer and bandleader Duke Ellington was so famous for his poise and charm that it should be no surprise that he had a pithy story at the ready whenever he was asked about one of his most famous and enduring works, "Mood Indigo." Of the song he and his orchestra recorded for the very first time on this day in 1930, Ellington was fond of saying, "Well, I wrote that in 15 minutes while I was waiting for my mother to finish cooking dinner." As neatly as that version fit with his well-tended reputation for effortless sophistication, the true account of the song's development reflects the gifts for collaboration and adaptation that were always critical elements of Ellington's genius.

The genesis of "Mood Indigo" was a visit to New York City in 1930 by a New Orleans jazzman named Lorenzo Tio, Jr. Duke Ellington's clarinetist, Barney Bigard, was a former student of Tio's, and on Tio's visit to New York, he shared with Bigard a number of melodies he'd written, including one called "Dreamy Blues" that had served as the theme song for his group back home, Armand Piron's New Orleans Orchestra. "I asked him if I could borrow it," Bigard later wrote in his autobiography. "I took it home and kept fooling around with it...and got something together that mostly was my own but partly Tio's." Bigard's variation on "Dreamy Blues" would soon become the clarinet solo on "Mood Indigo," thanks to Duke Ellington's penchant for involving his band members in his composition process.

Indeed, the lyricist Ervin Drake would later refer to Ellington's orchestra as a kind of "musical kibbutz"—an environment in which all ideas were welcomed and collaboration was the rule rather than the exception. Taking Bigard and Tio's melody and composing a song of his own on top of it, Ellington created "Mood Indigo." It wasn't the elegance of the composition alone, however, that made the song Ellington's first big hit. It was the completely unexpected voicing of the horns in Ellington's original arrangement of the song. The clarinet, trumpet and trombone were generally arranged, in that order, from highest pitch to lowest in jazz music. But Ellington turned the typical structure upside down on "Mood Indigo," using the clarinet near the bottom of its register and the muted trombone near the top of its—an arrangement that also produced interesting overtones with the electronic microphones of the day.

With lyrics added by Mitchell Parish in 1931 (but credited to Ellington's manager Irving Mills), "Mood Indigo" became a vocal-jazz standard as well as an instrumental one, recorded memorably by Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone among many others.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 16, 1773:
Philadelphia Resolutions criticize Tea Act

The first public statement against the British Parliament's Tea Act was a document printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette on this day in 1773. The document became known as the "Philadelphia Resolutions."

The Tea Act of 1773 was a bill designed to save the faltering British East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as yet another example of taxation tyranny. In response, the "Philadelphia Resolutions" called the British tax upon America unfair and said that it introduced "arbitrary government and slavery" upon the American citizens. The resolutions urged all Americans to oppose the British tax and stated that anyone who transported, sold or consumed the taxed tea would be considered "an enemy to his country."

On December 16, 1773, two months after the publication of the resolutions, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawks boarded three British tea ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor in what is now known as the Boston Tea Party.

Parliament, outraged by this blatant destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts—called the "Intolerable Acts" by the colonists—in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.



Oct 16, 1859:
Abolitionist John Brown leads a raid on Harpers Ferry

Abolitionist John Brown leads a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to start an armed slave revolt and destroy the institution of slavery.

Born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Ohio, Brown came from a staunchly Calvinist and antislavery family. He spent much of his life failing at a variety of businesses--he declared bankruptcy at age 42 and had more than 20 lawsuits filed against him. In 1837, his life changed irrevocably when he attended an abolition meeting in Cleveland, during which he was so moved that he publicly announced his dedication to destroying the institution of slavery. As early as 1848 he was formulating a plan to incite an insurrection.

In the 1850s, Brown traveled to Kansas with five of his sons to fight against the proslavery forces in the contest over that territory. On May 21, 1856, proslavery men raided the abolitionist town of Lawrence, and Brown personally sought revenge. On May 25, Brown and his sons attacked three cabins along Pottawatomie Creek. They killed five men with broad swords and triggered a summer of guerilla warfare in the troubled territory. One of Brown's sons was killed in the fighting.

By 1857, Brown returned to the East and began raising money to carry out his vision of a mass uprising of slaves. He secured the backing of six prominent abolitionists, known as the "Secret Six," and assembled an invasion force. His "army" grew to include 22 men, including five black men and three of Brown's sons. The group rented a Maryland farm near Harpers Ferry and prepared for the assault.

On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and his band overran the arsenal. Some of his men rounded up a handful of hostages, including a few slaves. Word of the raid spread, and by morning Brown and his men were surrounded. A company of U.S. marines arrived on October 17, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. On the morning of October 19, the soldiers overran Brown and his followers. Ten of his men were killed, including two of his sons.

The wounded Brown was tried by the state of Virginia for treason and murder, and he was found guilty on November 2. The 59-year-old abolitionist went to the gallows on December 2, 1859. Before his execution, he handed his guard a slip of paper that read, "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." It was a prophetic statement. Although the raid failed, it inflamed sectional tensions and raised the stakes for the 1860 presidential election. Brown's raid helped make any further accommodation between North and South nearly impossible and thus became an important impetus of the Civil War.



Oct 16, 1964:
China joins A-bomb club

The People's Republic of China joins the rank of nations with atomic bomb capability, after a successful nuclear test on this day in 1964. China is the fifth member of this exclusive club, joining the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France.

U.S. officials were not terribly surprised by the test; intelligence reports since the 1950s indicated that China was working to develop an atomic bomb, possibly aided by Soviet technicians and scientists. Nevertheless, the successful test did cause concern in the U.S. government. During the early 1960s, China took a particularly radical stance that advocated worldwide revolution against the forces of capitalism, working strenuously to extend its influence in Asia and the new nations of Africa. The test, coming just two months after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (a congressional resolution giving President Lyndon B. Johnson the power to respond to communist aggression in Vietnam) created a frightening specter of nuclear confrontation and conflict in Southeast Asia.

The test also concerned the Soviet Union; the split between the USSR and communist China over ideological and strategic issues had widened considerably by 1964. The Chinese acquisition of nuclear capabilities only heightened the tensions between the two nations. Indeed, the test might have been a spur to the Soviets to pursue greater efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons; in 1968, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Little wonder that the Soviets would wish to see China's nuclear force limited, since the first Chinese intermediate-range missiles were pointedly aimed at Russia. The Cold War nuclear arms race had just become a good deal more complicated.



Oct 16, 1976:
"Disco Duck" hits the #1 spot on the U.S. pop chart

The job description of a drive-time DJ on local radio back in 1976 was fairly straightforward: take some phone calls, be funny between records, give the call sign several times an hour and greet the public every so often at a local sporting event or auto-dealership opening. But as satisfying as that routine might have been to the average radio jock back in 1976, it left one ambitious young man named Rick Dees wanting something more. And so it was that Rick Dees created a novelty record called "Disco Duck," a song that hit the pop universe with such impeccable timing that it rocketed up the Billboard Hot 100 in the nation's Bicentennial year, hitting the #1 spot on October 16, 1976.

Rick Dees was working at station WMPS in Memphis, Tennessee, when he decided that the budding disco movement was ripe for a parody record. "One of the guys who worked out in [my] gym did a great duck voice," Dees later recalled, "so I said, how about a 'Disco Duck'?" From that rather modest moment of inspiration, Dees went home one afternoon and wrote the song that would end up transforming his career. Recorded on a local Memphis-area label, "Disco Duck" caught on first in Alabama, then across the South and eventually across the country after Dees convinced the label RSO to lease the song and release it nationally. On this day in 1976, Dees' little side project took over the #1 spot on the U.S. pop charts from "A Fifth of Beethoven"—a disco version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

One place where "Disco Duck" did not receive major airplay, however, was in Memphis itself. Competing stations hesitated to play the record, believing that it would indirectly promote their rival. And as for WMPS itself, Rick Dees was actually barred from playing his record as it was considered to be a conflict of interest. In fact, so different was the radio industry of 1976 from today's that Dees was ultimately fired from his post simply for discussing his record on the air. Though he never had another pop hit, Rick Dees nevertheless landed very much on his feet. Quickly hired by a local competitor whose parent company later promoted him to their Los Angeles flagship station, KIIS-FM, Dees went on to become the host of the internationally syndicated Rick Dees' Top 40 Countdown and an inductee into the Radio Hall of Fame.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 17, 1973:
OPEC states declare oil embargo

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) implements what it calls "oil diplomacy" on this day in 1973: It prohibits any nation that had supported Israel in its "Yom Kippur War" with Egypt, Syria and Jordan from buying any of the oil it sells. The ensuing energy crisis marked the end of the era of cheap gasoline and caused the share value of the New York Stock Exchange to drop by $97 billion. This, in turn, ushered in one of the worst recessions the United States had ever seen.

In the middle of 1973, even before the OPEC embargo, an American oil crisis was on the horizon: Domestic reserves were low (about 52 billion barrels, a 10-year supply); the United States was importing about 27 percent of the crude petroleum it needed every year; and gasoline prices were rising. The 1973 war with Israel made things even worse. OPEC announced that it would punish Israel's allies by implementing production cuts of 5 percent a month until that nation withdrew from the occupied territories and restored the rights of the Palestinians. It also declared that the true "enemies" of the Arab cause (in practice, this turned out to mean the United States and the Netherlands) would be subject to an indefinite "total embargo." Traditionally, per-barrel prices had been set by the oil companies themselves, but in December, OPEC announced that from then on, its members would set their own prices on the petroleum they exported. As a result, the price of a barrel of oil went up to $11.65, 130 percent higher than it had been in October and 387 percent higher than it had been the year before.

Domestic oil prices increased too, but shortages persisted. People waited for hours in long lines at gas stations—at some New Jersey pumps, lines were four miles long!--and by the time the embargo ended in March 1974, the average retail price of gas had climbed to 84 cents per gallon from 38 cents per gallon. Sales of smaller, more fuel-efficient cars skyrocketed. At the same time, declining demand for the big, heavy gas-guzzlers that most American car companies were producing spelled disaster for the domestic auto industry.



Oct 17, 1989:
Loma Prieta earthquake strikes near San Francisco

An earthquake hits the San Francisco Bay Area on this day in 1989, killing 67 people and causing more than $5 billion in damages. Though this was one of the most powerful and destructive earthquakes ever to hit a populated area of the United States, the death toll was quite small.

The proximity of the San Andreas Fault to San Francisco was well-known for most of the 20th century, but the knowledge did not stop the construction of many un-reinforced brick buildings in the area. Finally, in 1972, revised building codes forced new structures to be built to withstand earthquakes. The new regulations also called for older buildings to be retrofitted to meet the new standards, but the expense involved made these projects a low priority for the community.

On October 17, the Bay Area was buzzing about baseball. The Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, both local teams, had reached the World Series. The first game of the series was scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. at San Francisco's Candlestick Park. Just prior to the game, with the cameras on the field, a 7.1-magnitude tremor centered near Loma Prieta Peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains rocked the region from Santa Cruz to Oakland. Though the stadium withstood the shaking, much of the rest of San Francisco was not so fortunate.

The city's marina district suffered great damage. Built before 1972, on an area of the city where there was no underlying bedrock, the liquefaction of the ground resulted in the collapse of many homes. Burst gas mains and pipes also sparked fires that burned out of control for nearly two days. Also hard hit by the quake were two area roads, the Nimitz Expressway and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Both roads featured double-decker construction and, on each, the upper level collapsed during the earthquake. Forty-one of the 67 victims of this disaster were motorists on the lower level of the Nimitz, who were killed when the upper level of the road collapsed and crushed them in their cars. Only one person was killed on the Bay Bridge--which had been scheduled for a retrofitting the following week--because there were no cars under the section that collapsed.

Other heavily damaged communities included Watsonville, Daly City and Palo Alto. More than 10 percent of the homes in Watsonville were completely demolished. The residents, most of whom were Latino, faced additional hardship because relief workers and the Red Cross did not have enough Spanish-speaking aides or translators to assist them.

The earthquake caused billions of dollars in damages, and contributed in part to the deep recession that California suffered in the early 1990s.



Oct 17, 1961:
Algerians massacred in Paris

Paris police massacre more than 200 Algerians marching in the city in support of peace talks to end their country's war of independence against France.

Tensions were running high in Paris at the time, with Algerian terrorists setting off bombs in the French capital and randomly killing Paris policemen. In response, Paris police chief Maurice Papon ordered a crackdown on Paris' Algerian community, explaining to his officers that they would be protected against any charges of excessive violence. Police searched the Algerian ghettos for terrorists, killing a number of innocent Algerians before turning their guns on a group of 30,000 protesters who defied a curfew and gathered near the Seine River on the night of October 17. The next day, the police released an official death toll of three dead and 67 wounded, a figure generally disregarded by witnesses who observed bodies littering the area and floating in the Seine.

In 1981, it was revealed that Maurice Papon had collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of France, and he was forced to resign his three-year-old position as budget minister in the cabinet. Papon, a former official in France's Vichy regime, was suspected of aiding in the deportation of hundreds of French Jews to the Nazi death camps. After avoiding a trial for 17 years, Papon was found guilty of ''complicity in crimes against humanity'' in 1998 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. During his trial, documents about the 1961 massacre in Paris surfaced, acknowledging that Papon's policemen had killed many more Algerians than previously admitted.



Oct 17, 1960:
R&B legends the Drifters earn a #1 pop hit with "Save the Last Dance For Me"

The Drifters top the U.S. pop charts on October 17, 1960, with "Save the Last Dance For Me."

While many famous pop groups saw changes in lineup over the course of their careers, none saw as many as the Drifters. From 1953 to 1956, the original lineup of the Drifters established themselves as R&B giants, scoring a #1 R&B hit with "Money Honey" (1953) and launching the solo career of the legendary Clyde McPhatter. When McPhatter left the group, he sold his 50-percent ownership stake in the Drifters' name and song copyrights to his sole partner, the group's manager, George Treadwell. And from that point forward, Treadwell ran the Drifters as a business in which the group's singers were paid a modest weekly salary but did not share in royalty earnings. This arrangement did little to encourage longevity among group members, but Treadwell's ear for talent kept the group relevant and successful for many years to come.

Following McPhatter's departure in 1956, Treadwell ran through six different lead singers in two years before firing the entire group in 1958 and starting over from scratch. Version 2.0 of the Drifters was a group centered around lead singer Benjamin Nelson and originally called the Five Crowns. With that group taking on the new name "the Drifters," and with Nelson changing his to Ben E. King, a new era of success for the group began. Placed in the hands of producer Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller by their label, Atlantic Records, these new Drifters scored immediate hits with "There Goes My Baby" (1959) and "This Magic Moment" (1960) followed by the song that topped the Billboard pop charts on this day in 1960, "Save The Last Dance For Me."

But this was not the last lineup of the Drifters to enjoy success. Following Ben. E. King's departure in 1960, group member Rudy Lewis took over lead singing duties on the hits "Up On The Roof" (1963) and "On Broadway" (1963), and following Lewis's death in 1964, Johnny Moore took over and scored yet another hit with "Under The Boardwalk" (1964).

Considering the group's track record, it was little wonder that voters for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame selected the Drifters for induction in 1988 alongside the Beatles, the Supremes, the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. The thorny question was, "Which Drifters to induct?" From among more than 30 singers who had been Drifters up to that point in time, the Hall of Fame selected seven for induction, including all four of the aforementioned lead singers: Clyde McPhatter, Ben E. King, Rudy Lewis and Johnny Moore.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 18, 1867:
U.S. takes possession of Alaska

On this day in 1867, the U.S. formally takes possession of Alaska after purchasing the territory from Russia for $7.2 million, or less than two cents an acre. The Alaska purchase comprised 586,412 square miles, about twice the size of Texas, and was championed by William Henry Seward, the enthusiasticly expansionist secretary of state under President Andrew Johnson.

Russia wanted to sell its Alaska territory, which was remote, sparsely populated and difficult to defend, to the U.S. rather than risk losing it in battle with a rival such as Great Britain. Negotiations between Seward (1801-1872) and the Russian minister to the U.S., Eduard de Stoeckl, began in March 1867. However, the American public believed the land to be barren and worthless and dubbed the purchase "Seward's Folly" and "Andrew Johnson's Polar Bear Garden," among other derogatory names. Some animosity toward the project may have been a byproduct of President Johnson's own unpopularity. As the 17th U.S. president, Johnson battled with Radical Republicans in Congress over Reconstruction policies following the Civil War. He was impeached in 1868 and later acquitted by a single vote. Nevertheless, Congress eventually ratified the Alaska deal. Public opinion of the purchase turned more favorable when gold was discovered in a tributary of Alaska's Klondike River in 1896, sparking a gold rush. Alaska became the 49th state on January 3, 1959, and is now recognized for its vast natural resources. Today, 25 percent of America's oil and over 50 percent of its seafood come from Alaska. It is also the largest state in area, about one-fifth the size of the lower 48 states combined, though it remains sparsely populated. The name Alaska is derived from the Aleut word alyeska, which means "great land." Alaska has two official state holidays to commemorate its origins: Seward's Day, observed the last Monday in March, celebrates the March 30, 1867, signing of the land treaty between the U.S. and Russia, and Alaska Day, observed every October 18, marks the anniversary of the formal land transfer.



Oct 18, 1933:
R. Buckminster Fuller tries to patent his Dymaxion Car

On October 18, 1933, the American philosopher-inventor R. Buckminster Fuller applies for a patent for his Dymaxion Car. The Dymaxion—the word itself was another Fuller invention, a combination of "dynamic," "maximum," and "ion"—looked and drove like no vehicle anyone had ever seen. It was a three-wheeled, 20-foot-long, pod-shaped automobile that could carry 11 passengers and travel as fast as 120 miles per hour. It got 30 miles to the gallon, could U-turn in a distance equal to its length and could parallel park just by pivoting its wheels toward the curb and zipping sideways into its parking space. It was stylish, efficient and eccentric and it attracted a great deal of attention: Celebrities wanted to ride in it and rich men wanted to invest in it. But in the same month that Fuller applied for his patent, one of his prototype Dymaxions crashed, killing the driver and alarming investors so much that they withdrew their money from the project.

When Fuller first sketched the Dymaxion Car in 1927, it was a half-car, half-airplane—when it got going fast enough, its wings were supposed to inflate—called the "4D Transport." In 1932, the sculptor Isamu Naguchi helped the inventor with his final design: a long teardrop-shaped chassis with two wheels in front and a third in back that could lift off the ground. In practice, this didn't turn out to be a great idea: As the vehicle picked up speed (theoretically in preparation for takeoff) and the third wheel bounced off the ground, it became nearly impossible for the driver to control the car. In fact, many people blamed this handling problem for the fatal crash of the prototype car, even though an investigation revealed that a car full of sightseers had actually caused the accident by hurtling into the Dymaxion's lane.

Many elements of the Dymaxion Car's design—its streamlined shape, its fuel efficiency—have inspired later generations of automakers, but Fuller himself was probably best known for another of his inventions: the geodesic dome. Geodesic domes are built using a pattern of self-bracing triangles. As a result, perhaps unlike the Dymaxion Car, they are incredibly strong and stable—in fact, as one historian writes, "they have proved to be the strongest structures ever devised."



Oct 18, 1469:
Ferdinand and Isabella marry

Ferdinand of Aragon marries Isabella of Castile in Valladolid, thus beginning a cooperative reign that would unite all the dominions of Spain and elevate the nation to a dominant world power. Ferdinand and Isabella incorporated a number of independent Spanish dominions into their kingdom and in 1478 introduced the Spanish Inquisition, a powerful and brutal force of homogenization in Spanish society. In 1492, the reconquest of Granada from the Moors was completed, and the crown ordered all Spanish Jews to convert to Christianity or face expulsion from Spain. Four years later, Spanish Muslims were handed a similar order.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer sponsored by Isabella and Ferdinand, discovered the New World for Europe and claimed the rich, unspoiled territory for Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella's subsequent decision to encourage vigorous colonial activity in the Americas led to a period of great prosperity and imperial supremacy for Spain.



Oct 18, 1974:
Soul singer Al Green is attacked in his own bathtub

There can be no question that anyone would have been shaken by the events that transpired in the Memphis, Tennessee, home of singer Al Green in the early morning hours of October 18, 1974, when an ex-girlfriend burst in on him in the bath and poured a pot of scalding-hot grits on his back before retreating to a bedroom and shooting herself dead with Green's own gun. Not everyone, however, would have processed the meaning of the incident quite the way that Green did. Believing that he had strayed from the righteous musical and spiritual course intended for him, Al Green had become a born-again Christian one year earlier. But after the attack by Mary Woodson on this day in 1974, he began a process that would eventually lead him to renounce pop superstardom and all that it stood for.

Al Green, widely renowned as one of the greatest voices in soul-music history, was at the absolute height of his powers in 1974. He had seven critically and commercially successful major-label albums behind him that included such timeless hits as "Tired Of Being Alone" (1971), "Let's Stay Together" (1971) and "I'm Still In Love With You" (1972). He also, in the words of Davin Seay, who collaborated with Green on his 2000 autobiography, Take Me To The River, had a "basic animal appeal to women" that attracted many admirers, including Mary Woodson.

Mary Woodson first made Green's acquaintance after leaving her husband and children behind in New Jersey and attending one of his concerts in upstate New York. On the night of the attack, Woodson had shown up unexpectedly at Green's Memphis home after he returned from a concert appearance in San Francisco. What exactly prompted her to act is unclear, but her actions not only left Al Green with severe burns that would require months of hospitalization, they also left him severely shaken emotionally and spiritually. "He likes to distance the facts of his [religious] conversion from the terrible events of that night," says Seay, "but I think the Woodson incident kind of crystallized his need to move on, to sort of shut down one part of his life and open up another.''

By 1976, Al Green had become an ordained Baptist minister and purchased a Memphis church where he still preaches today. He also renounced secular R&B for a time, recording gospel music almost exclusively through the late 1970s and early 1980s before embracing his past and reviving his earlier repertoire again in the late 1980s.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 19, 1812:
Napoleon retreats from Moscow

One month after Napoleon Bonaparte's massive invading force entered a burning and deserted Moscow, the starving French army is forced to begin a hasty retreat out of Russia.

Following the rejection of his Continental System by Czar Alexander I, French Emperor Napoleon I invaded Russia with his Grande Armée on June 24, 1812. The enormous army, featuring more than 500,000 soldiers and staff, was the largest European military force ever assembled to that date.

During the opening months of the invasion, Napoleon was forced to contend with a bitter Russian army in perpetual retreat. Refusing to engage Napoleon's superior army in a full-scale confrontation, the Russians under General Mikhail Kutuzov burned everything behind them as they retreated deeper and deeper into Russia. On September 7, the indecisive Battle of Borodino was fought, in which both sides suffered terrible losses. On September 14, Napoleon arrived in Moscow intending to find supplies but instead found almost the entire population evacuated, and the Russian army retreated again. Early the next morning, fires broke across the city set by Russian patriots, and the Grande Grande Armée's winter quarters were destroyed. After waiting a month for a surrender that never came, Napoleon, faced with the onset of the Russian winter, was forced to order his starving army out of Moscow.

During the disastrous retreat, Napoleon's army suffered continual harassment from a suddenly aggressive and merciless Russian army. Stalked by hunger and the deadly lances of the Cossacks, the decimated army reached the Berezina River late in November but found its route blocked by the Russians. On November 26, Napoleon forced a way across at Studienka, and when the bulk of his army passed the river three days later, he was forced to burn his makeshift bridges behind him, stranding some 10,000 stragglers on the other side. From there, the retreat became a rout, and on December 8 Napoleon left what remained of his army to return to Paris with a few cohorts. Six days later, the Grande Armée finally escaped Russia, having suffered a loss of more than 400,000 men during the disastrous invasion.



Oct 19, 1935:
Ethiopia stands alone

The League of Nations votes to impose deliberately ineffectual economic sanctions against Fascist Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia. Steps that would impede the progress of the invasion, such as banning the sale of oil to Italy and closing the Suez Canal, were not taken, out of fear of igniting hostilities in Europe.

In the first loss of Ethiopian independence in its long history, tens of thousands of Ethiopians were killed as the Italian army employed poison gas and other modern atrocities to suppress the country. By the end of 1936, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia was complete. Ethiopia's leader, Emperor Haile Selassie, went into exile but returned in 1941, when British and Ethiopian troops liberated the country. Ignoring the British occupation authorities, Selassie quickly organized his own government.



Oct 19, 1989:
Guildford Four are cleared

The Guildford Four, convicted of the 1975 IRA bombings of public houses in Guildford and Woolwich, England, are cleared of all charges after nearly 15 years in prison.

On October 5, 1974, an IRA bomb killed four people in a Guildford pub frequented by British military personnel, while another bomb in Woolwich killed three. British investigators rushed to find suspects and soon settled on Gerry Conlon and Paul Hill, two residents of Northern Ireland who had been in the area at the time of the terrorist attack.

Under the recent Prevention of Terrorism Act, British investigators were allowed to hold and interrogate terrorist suspects for five days without any hard evidence. Conlon and Hill, who were nonpolitical petty criminals, were among the first suspects held under the new law. During their prison stay, investigators fabricated against them an IRA conspiracy that implicated a number of their friends and family members. The officers then forced the two suspects to sign confessions under physical and mental torture. In 1975, Gerry Conlon, Paul Hill, Paddy Armstrong, and Carole Richardson were sentenced to life in prison. Seven of their relatives and friends, called the Maguire Seven, were sentenced to lesser terms on the basis of questionable forensic evidence.

In 1989, in the face of growing public protest and after the disclosure of exonerating evidence, including the admittance of guilt in the bombings by an imprisoned IRA member, the Guildford Four were cleared of all charges and released after 14 years in prison. In the next year, a British appeals court also overturned the convictions of the Maguire Seven, who were jailed on the basis of forensic evidence that was shown to have no relevant scientific basis.



Oct 19, 1985:
"Take on Me" music video helps Norway's a-Ha reach the top the U.S. pop charts

From its beginnings in the early 1980s, it was clear that MTV, the Music Television Network, would have a dramatic effect on the way pop stars marketed their music and themselves. While radio remained a necessary engine to drive the sales and chart rankings of singles and albums, the rise of new artists like Duran Duran and the further ascent of established stars like Michael Jackson showed that creativity and esthetic appeal on MTV could make a direct and undeniable contribution to a musical performer's commercial success. But if ever a case existed in which MTV did more than just contribute to an act's success, it was the case of the Norwegian band a-Ha, who went from total unknowns to chart-topping pop stars almost solely on the strength of the groundbreaking video for the song "Take On Me," which hit #1 on the Billboard pop chart on this day in 1985.

By 1985 the medium was established enough that it took a unique angle to achieve music video stardom. Enter a-Ha, a synth-pop group that caught a late ride on the dying New Wave thanks to the video for "Take On Me," in which lead singer Morten Harket was transformed using a decades-old technology called Rotoscoping. The creators of the "Take On Me" video painted portions or sometimes the entirety of individual frames to create the effect of a dashingly handsome comic-book motorcycle racer (Harket) romancing a pretty girl from the real world, fighting off a gang of angry pursuers in a pipe-wrench fight before bursting out of the comic-book world as a dashingly handsome real boy.

The wildly popular video was an esthetic marvel at the moment of its unveiling, and it propelled a-Ha not only to the top spot on the pop charts, but to a still-unbeaten record of eight wins at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards. Predictably enough, the F/X gimmick that seemed so fresh in "Take On Me" soon became something of a cliché, showing up in ads for everything from minivans to maxi-pads. As for a-Ha, they may be thought of by many Americans as one-hit wonders—or two-hit wonders for those who remember "The Sun Always Shines On T.V."—but internationally they have enjoyed a tremendously successful recording career without any further help from MTV.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 20, 2011:
Libyan Dictator Moammar Gadhafi is Killed

On this day in 2011, Moammar Gadhafi, the longest-serving leader in Africa and the Arab world, is captured and killed by rebel forces near his hometown of Sirte. The eccentric 69-year-old dictator, who came to power in a 1969 coup, headed a government that was accused of numerous human rights violations against its own people and was linked to terrorist attacks, including the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Gadhafi, who was born into a Bedouin family in June 1942, attended the Royal Military Academy in Benghazi as a young man and briefly received additional military training in Great Britain. On September 1, 1969, he led a bloodless coup that overthrew Libya's pro-Western monarch, King Idris, who was out of the country at the time. Gadhafi emerged as the head of the new revolutionary government, which soon forced the closing of American and British military bases in Libya, took control of much of the nation's oil industry, and tortured and killed political dissenters. It also made unsuccessful attempts to merge Libya with other Arab nations. Gadhafi began funding terrorist and guerilla groups around the globe, including the Irish Republican Army and the Red Army Faction in West Germany. Additionally, in the mid-1970s, Gadhafi, whose followers referred to him by such titles as "Brother Leader" and "Guide of the Revolution," published his political philosophy, which combined socialist and Islamic theories. Known as the Green Book, the manifesto became required reading in Libyan schools.

During the 1980s, tensions increased between Gadhafi and the West. Libya was linked the April 1986 bombing of a West Berlin, Germany, nightclub frequented by American military personnel. Two people, including a U.S. soldier, were killed in the attack, while some 155 others were wounded. The United States swiftly retaliated by bombing targets in Libya, including Gadhafi"s compound in Tripoli, the nation"s capital. President Ronald Reagan called Gadhafi "the mad dog of the Middle East."

On December 22, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, traveling from London to New York, was blown up over Lockerbie, killing 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground. The U.S. and Britain indicted two Libyans in the attack, but Gadhafi initially refused to turn over the suspects. He also declined to surrender a group of Libyans suspected in the 1989 bombing of a French passenger jet over Niger that killed 170 people. Subsequently, in 1992, the United Nations imposed economic sanctions on Libya. These sanctions were removed in 2003, after the country formally accepted responsibility for the bombings (but admitted no guilt) and agreed to pay a $2.7 billion settlement to the victims' families. (Gadhafi's government had turned over the Lockerbie suspects in 1999; one was eventually acquitted and the other convicted.) Also in 2003, Gadhafi agreed to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction. Diplomatic relations with the West were restored by the following year.

Gadhafi remained a controversial and eccentric figure, who traveled with a contingent of female bodyguards, wore colorful robes and hats or military uniforms covered with medals, and on trips abroad set up a Bedouin-style tent to receive guests.

After more than 40 years in power, Gadhafi saw his regime begin to unravel in February 2011, when anti-government protests broke out in Libya following the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia earlier that year. Gadhafi vowed to crush the revolt and ordered a violent crackdown against the demonstrators. However, by August, rebel forces, with assistance from NATO, had gained control of Tripoli and established a transitional government. Gadhafi went into hiding, but on October 20, 2011, he was captured and shot by rebel forces.



Oct 20, 1977:
Three members of the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd die in a Mississippi plane crash

In the summer of 1977, members of the rock band Aerosmith inspected an airplane they were considering chartering for their upcoming tour—a Convair 240 operated out of Addison, Texas. Concerns over the flight crew led Aerosmith to look elsewhere—a decision that saved one band but doomed another. The aircraft in question was instead chartered by the band Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were just setting out that autumn on a national tour that promised to be their biggest to date. On this day in 1977, however, during a flight from Greenville, South Carolina, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lynyrd Skynyrd's tour plane crashed in a heavily wooded area of southeastern Mississippi during a failed emergency landing attempt, killing band-members Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie Gaines as well as the band's assistant road manager and the plane's pilot and co-pilot. Twenty others survived the crash.

The original core of Lynyrd Skynyrd—Ronnie Van Zant, Bob Burns, Gary Rossington, Allen Collins and Larry Junstrom—first came together under the name "My Backyard" back in 1964, as Jacksonville, Florida, teenagers. Under that name and several others, the group developed its chops playing local and regional gigs throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, then finally broke out nationally in 1973 following the adoption of the name "Lynyrd Skynyrd" in honor of a high school gym teacher/nemesis named Leonard Skinner. The newly renamed band scored a major hit with their hard-driving debut album (pronounced 'lĕh-'nérd 'skin-'nérd) (1973), which featured one of the most familiar and joked-about rock anthems of all time, "Free Bird." Their follow-up album, Second Helping (1974), included the even bigger hit "Sweet Home Alabama," and it secured the band's status as giants of the southern rock subgenre.

On October 17, 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd—now in a lineup that included backup singer Cassie Gaines and her guitarist brother, Steve—released their fifth studio album, Street Survivors, which would eventually be certified double-platinum. Three days later, however, tragedy struck the group when their chartered Convair 240 began to run out of fuel at 6,000 feet en route to Baton Rouge. The plane's crew, whom the National Transportation Safety Board would hold responsible for the mishap in the accident report issued eight months later, radioed Houston air-traffic control as the plane lost altitude, asking for directions to the nearest airfield. "We're low on fuel and we're just about out of it," the pilot told Houston Center at approximately 6:42 pm. "We want vectors to McComb [airfield] poste-haste please, sir." Approximately 13 minutes later, however, the plane crashed just outside of Gillsburg, Mississippi.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 21, 1929:
Henry Ford dedicates the Thomas Edison Institute

On this day in 1929, the 50th birthday of the incandescent light bulb, Henry Ford throws a big party to celebrate the dedication of his new Thomas Edison Institute in Dearborn, Michigan. Everybody who was anybody was there: John D. Rockefeller Jr., Charles Schwab, Otto H. Kahn, Walter Chrysler, Marie Curie, Will Rogers, President Herbert Hoover—and, of course, the guest of honor, Thomas Edison himself. At the time, the Edison Institute was still relatively small. It consisted of just two buildings, both of which Henry Ford had moved from Menlo Park, New Jersey and re-constructed to look just as they had in 1879: Edison's laboratory and the boarding-house where he had lived while he perfected his invention. By the time the Institute opened to the public in 1933, however, it had grown much more elaborate and today the Henry Ford Museum (renamed after Ford's death in 1947) is one of the largest and best-known museums in the country.

Ford's museum was an epic expression of his own interpretation of American history, emphasizing industrial and technological progress and the "practical genius" of great Americans. Its collection grew to include every Ford car ever built, along with other advances in automotive and locomotive technology. There were also farm tools, home appliances, furniture and industrial machines such as the printing press and the Newcomen steam engine. On a 200-acre tract next door, Ford built a quaint all-American village by importing historic homes and buildings from across the United States. "When we are through," Ford told The New York Times, "we shall have reproduced American life as lived; and that, I think, is the best way of preserving at least a part of our history and tradition."

Today, there are more than 200 cars on display at the Ford museum, including the 15 millionth Model T, the Ford 999 racer that set the world speed record in 1904, the first Mustang ever produced and a 1997 EV1 electric car made by General Motors. More than 2 million people visit "The Henry Ford," as it's now called, every year.



Oct 21, 1966:
Mudslide buries school in Wales

On this day in 1966, an avalanche of mud and rocks buries a school in Aberfan, Wales, killing 148 people, mostly young students. The elementary school was located below a hill where a mining operation dumped its waste.

Aberfan is a small mining village in the Taff River Valley. A substantial number of the village's residents worked at the Merthyr Vale Colliery, a coal mine that had been privatized by the National Coal Board in 1947. At the Merthyr Vale mine, 36 tons a day of ash, coal waste and sludge were produced. This was piled up in what was known as a tip. The largest Merthyr Vale tip was nearly 700 feet high at the time of the accident.

Down a large hill from this tip sat a small farm and the brick Pant Glas elementary school, as well as some homes. In the days leading up to October 21, there was heavy rain in the area. Some mine workers noticed cracks in the tip, but nothing was done to investigate further. The morning of October 21 dawned dark and damp; the area was covered by a thick fog. At about 9 a.m., mine workers heard a loud noise and through the fog saw that the immense tip had disappeared.

The tip had crashed down the hillside onto the farm, the school and eight homes. Thick black dust enveloped the entire village. The muddy sludge was 45 feet deep outside the school and much of the school itself was buried. There were about 250 people in the school when the avalanche hit and more than half were initially missing. Among those who survived, many had severe injuries. The speed and power of the avalanche had ripped appendages right off of some victims.

Parents and rescue workers immediately began to dig through the debris to find the children. The last survivor to be pulled clear was out within the first two hours. The next six days of digging brought out only dead bodies, including those of 116 children. The body of the deputy head teacher was found with the bodies of five children in his arms.

Harold Wilson, Britain's prime minister, visited the scene and promised an inquiry. After five months of investigation and the deposition of more than 100 witnesses, it was determined that the tip had blocked the natural course of water down the hill. As the water was soaked into the tip, pressure built up inside until it cracked, with devastating results. The site of the disaster later became a park.



Oct 21, 1959:
Von Braun moves to NASA

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order transferring the brilliant rocket designer Wernher von Braun and his team from the U.S. Army to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Von Braun, the mastermind of the U.S. space program, had developed the lethal V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany during World War II.

Wernher von Braun was born into an aristocratic German family in 1912. He became fascinated with rocketry and the possibility of space travel after reading Hermann Oberth's The Rocket into Interplanetary Space (1923) when he was in his early teens. He studied mechanical engineering and physics in Berlin and in his free time assisted Oberth in his tests of liquid-fueled rockets. In 1932, Von Braun's rocket work attracted the attention of the German army, and he was given a grant to continue his work. He was eventually hired to lead the army's rocket artillery unit, and by 1937 he was the technical director of a large development facility located at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea.

Von Braun's rocket tests impressed the Nazi leadership, who provided generous funding to the program. The most sophisticated rockets produced at Peenemünde were the long-range ballistic missile A-4 and the anti-aircraft missile Wasserfall. The A-4 was years ahead of rockets being produced in other nations at the time. It traveled at 3,600 mph, was capable of delivering a warhead a distance of more than 200 miles, and was the first rocket to enter the fringes of space. In 1944, the Nazis changed the name of A-4 to V-2 and began launching the rockets against London and Antwerp. The V stood for Vergeltung—the German word for "vengeance"—and was an expression of Nazi vindictiveness over the Allied bombardment of Germany. The V-2s took many lives but came too late to influence the outcome of the war.

Von Braun and 400 members of his team fled before the advancing Russians in 1945 and surrendered to the Americans. U.S. troops quickly seized more than 300 train-car loads of spare V-2 parts, and the German scientists were taken to the United States, eventually settling at Fort Bliss, Texas, where they resumed their rocketry work. At first, they were closely supervised because of their former allegiance to Nazi Germany, but it soon became apparent that they had fully shifted their loyalty to America and the great scientific opportunities it provided for them.

In 1950, von Braun and his team, which now included Americans, were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, to head the U.S. Army ballistic-weapons program. During the 1950s, von Braun enthusiastically promoted the possibilities of space flight in books and magazines. In 1955, he became a U.S. citizen.

The USSR successfully launched Sputnik—the world's first artificial satellite—in October 1957, but von Braun's team was not far behind with its launching of the first American satellite—Explorer 1—in January 1958. In July of that year, President Eisenhower signed legislation establishing NASA, and on October 21 von Braun was formally transferred to the new agency. Von Braun, however, did not really go anywhere; NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center was built around von Braun's headquarters in Huntsville. In 1960, he was named the Marshall Center's first director.

At Huntsville, von Braun oversaw construction of the large Saturn launch vehicles that kept the United States abreast of Soviet space achievements in the early and mid 1960s. In the late 1960s, von Braun's genius came to the fore in the space race, and the Soviets failed in their efforts to build intricate booster rockets of the type that put the first U.S. astronauts into a lunar orbit in 1968. Von Braun's Saturn rockets eventually took 27 Americans to the moon, 12 who walked on the lunar surface. Von Braun retired from NASA in 1972 and died five years later.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 22, 1934:
Pretty Boy Floyd is killed by the FBI

Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd is shot by FBI agents in a cornfield in East Liverpool, Ohio. Floyd, who had been a hotly pursued fugitive for four years, used his last breath to deny his involvement in the infamous Kansas City Massacre, in which four officers were shot to death at a train station. He died shortly thereafter.

Charles Floyd grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. When it became impossible to operate a small farm in the drought conditions of the late 1920s, Floyd tried his hand at bank robbery. He soon found himself in a Missouri prison for robbing a St. Louis payroll delivery. After being paroled in 1929, he learned that Jim Mills had shot his father to death. Since Mills, who had been acquitted of the charges, was never heard from or seen again, Floyd was believed to have killed him.

Moving on to Kansas City, Floyd got mixed up with the city's burgeoning criminal community. A local prostitute gave Floyd the nickname "Pretty Boy," which he hated. Along with a couple of friends he had met in prison, he robbed several banks in Missouri and Ohio, but was eventually caught in Ohio and sentenced to 12-15 years. On the way to prison, Floyd kicked out a window and jumped from the speeding train. He made it to Toledo, where he hooked up with Bill "The Killer" Miller.

The two went on a crime spree across several states until Miller was killed in a spectacular firefight in Bowling Green, Ohio, in 1931. Once he was back in Kansas City, Floyd killed a federal agent during a raid and became a nationally known criminal figure. This time he escaped to the backwoods of Oklahoma. The locals there, reeling from the Depression, were not about to turn in an Oklahoma native for robbing banks. Floyd became a Robin Hood-type figure, staying one step ahead of the law. Even the Joads, characters in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, spoke well of Floyd.

However, not everyone was so enamored with "Pretty Boy." Oklahoma's governor put out a $6,000 bounty on his head. On June 17, 1933, when law enforcement officials were ambushed by a machine-gun attack in a Kansas City train station while transporting criminal Frank Nash to prison, Floyd's notoriety grew even more. Although it was not clear whether or not Floyd was responsible, both the FBI and the nation's press pegged the crime on him nevertheless. Subsequently, pressure was stepped up to capture the illustrious fugitive, and the FBI finally got their man in October 1934.



Oct 22, 1975:
Gay sergeant challenges the Air Force

Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, is given a "general" discharge by the air force after publicly declaring his homosexuality. Matlovich, who appeared in his air force uniform on the cover of Time magazine above the headline "I AM A HOMOSEXUAL," was challenging the ban against homosexuals in the U.S. military.

In 1979, after winning a much-publicized case against the air force, his discharge was upgraded to "honorable." In 1988, Matlovich died at the age of 44 of complications from AIDS. He was buried with full military honors at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. His tombstone reads, "A gay Vietnam Veteran. When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."



Oct 22, 1811:
Pianist and composer Franz Liszt is born

Born on this day in 1811 in the Hapsburg Kingdom of Hungary, Franz Liszt would go on to make a name for himself not only as an important composer in the Romantic era, but also as one of the greatest pianists who ever lived. In a career that spanned five eventful decades in classical-music history, his professional accomplishments alone would have made him a figure of historical significance, but his good looks and charisma, his effect on female audiences and his gossip-worthy romantic entanglements made him a figure somewhat larger than life. If it weren't for the fact that rock and roll was still 140-plus years off in the future, it would be reasonable to call Franz Liszt the biggest rock star of his era.

Born to a musician father employed in the service of a Hungarian prince, Liszt learned piano by the age of seven and was recognized shortly thereafter as a budding virtuoso. His musical education, paid for by a group of Hungarian noblemen, took place in Vienna. It was in Paris during his teens and early 20s, however, that Liszt first gained widespread public attention as a performer. Though his stature as a composer continued to grow throughout his long career, his reputation as a pianist both preceded and exceeded it. Influenced most heavily not by another pianist but by the violinist Niccolò Paganini, Liszt developed a style that helped shape the future of piano technique, and he developed a following—particularly among women—that made him a massive concert draw throughout Europe at the height of his career in the 1840s and 50s. (It was no accident that director Ken Russell cast lead singer Roger Daltry of the Who in the role of Liszt in his 1975 film Lisztomania.)

Away from the piano, Liszt also conducted a number of high-profile and often controversial affairs over course of his career, beginning with a student who was also the daughter of high-ranking French government official and continuing through several famous dancers, a French countess and a Polish princess. Widely believed to have fathered many children out of wedlock, Liszt famously denied one such paternity claim by writing, "I know his mother only by correspondence, and one cannot arrange that sort of thing by correspondence."

Franz Liszt died of pneumonia on July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Bavaria.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 23, 2002:
Hostage crisis in Moscow theater

On October 23, 2002, about 50 Chechen rebels storm a Moscow theater, taking up to 700 people hostage during a sold-out performance of a popular musical.

The second act of the musical "Nord Ost" was just beginning at the Moscow Ball-Bearing Plant's Palace of Culture when an armed man walked onstage and fired a machine gun into the air. The terrorists—including a number of women with explosives strapped to their bodies—identified themselves as members of the Chechen Army. They had one demand: that Russian military forces begin an immediate and complete withdrawal from Chechnya, the war-torn region located north of the Caucasus Mountains.

Chechnya, with its predominately Muslim population, had long struggled to assert its independence. A disastrous two-year war ended in 1996, but Russian forces returned to the region just three years later after Russian authorities blamed Chechens for a series of bombings in Russia. In 2000, President Vladimir Putin was elected partly because of his hard-line position towards Chechnya and his public vow not to negotiate with terrorists.

After a 57-hour-standoff at the Palace of Culture, during which two hostages were killed, Russian special forces surrounded and raided the theater on the morning of October 26. Later it was revealed that they had pumped a powerful narcotic gas into the building, knocking nearly all of the terrorists and hostages unconscious before breaking into the walls and roof and entering through underground sewage tunnels. Most of the guerrillas and 120 hostages were killed during the raid. Security forces were later forced to defend the decision to use the dangerous gas, saying that only a complete surprise attack could have disarmed the terrorists before they had time to detonate their explosives.

After the theater crisis, Putin's government clamped down even harder on Chechnya, drawing accusations of kidnapping, torture and other atrocities. In response, Chechen rebels continued their terrorist attacks on Russian soil, including an alleged suicide bombing in a Moscow subway in February 2004 and another major hostage crisis at a Beslan school that September.



Oct 23, 1983:
U.S. Embassy in Beirut hit by massive car bomb

On this day, a suicide bomber drives a truck filled with 2,000 pounds of explosives into a U.S. Marine Corps barracks at the Beirut International Airport. The explosion killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers. A few minutes after that bomb went off, a second bomber drove into the basement of the nearby French paratroopers' barracks, killing 58 more people. Four months after the bombing, American forces left Lebanon without retaliating.

The Marines in Beirut were part of a multinational peacekeeping force that was trying to broker a truce between warring Christian and Muslim Lebanese factions. In 1981, American troops had supervised the withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Beirut and then had withdrawn themselves. They returned the next year, after Israel's Lebanese allies slaughtered nearly 1,000 unarmed Palestinian civilian refugees. Eighteen hundred Marine peacekeepers moved into an old Israeli Army barracks near the airport—a fortress with two-foot–thick walls that could, it seemed, withstand anything. Even after a van bomb killed 46 people at the U.S. Embassy in April, the American troops maintained their non-martial stance: their perimeter fence remained relatively unfortified, for instance and their sentries' weapons were unloaded.

At about 6:20 in the morning on October 23, 1983, a yellow Mercedes truck charged through the barbed-wire fence around the American compound and plowed past two guard stations. It drove straight into the barracks and exploded. Eyewitnesses said that the force of the blast caused the entire building to float up above the ground for a moment before it pancaked down in a cloud of pulverized concrete and human remains. FBI investigators said that it was the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II and certainly the most powerful car bomb ever detonated.

After the bombing, President Ronald Reagan expressed outrage at the "despicable act" and vowed that American forces would stay in Beirut until they could forge a lasting peace. In the meantime, he devised a plan to bomb the Hezbollah training camp in Baalbek, Lebanon, where intelligence agents thought the attack had been planned. However, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger aborted the mission, reportedly because he did not want to strain relations with oil-producing Arab nations. The next February, American troops withdrew from Lebanon altogether.

The first real car bomb—or, in this case, horse-drawn-wagon bomb—exploded on September 16, 1920 outside the J.P. Morgan Company's offices in New York City's financial district. Italian anarchist Mario Buda had planted it there, hoping to kill Morgan himself; as it happened, the robber baron was out of town, but 40 other people died (and about 200 were wounded) in the blast. There were occasional car-bomb attacks after that—most notably in Saigon in 1952, Algiers in 1962, and Palermo in 1963—but vehicle weapons remained relatively uncommon until the 1970s and 80s, when they became the terrifying trademark of groups like the Irish Republican Army and Hezbollah. In 1995, right-wing terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols used a bomb hidden in a Ryder truck to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.



Oct 23, 1956:
Hungarian protest turns violent

Thousands of Hungarians erupt in protest against the Soviet presence in their nation and are met with armed resistance. Organized demonstrations by Hungarian citizens had been ongoing since June 1956, when signs of political reform in Poland raised the possibility for such changes taking place in their own nation. On October 23, however, the protests erupted into violence as students, workers, and even some soldiers demanded more democracy and freedom from what they viewed as an oppressive Soviet presence in Hungary.

Hungarian leader Erno Gero, an avowed Stalinist, only succeeded in inflaming the crowds with praise for the Soviet Union's policies. Furious fighting broke out in Budapest between the protesters and Hungarian security forces and Soviet soldiers. In the next few days, hundreds of protesters in Budapest and other Hungarian cities were killed in these battles. Gero appealed for additional Soviet assistance and this was forthcoming in the form of an armored division that rolled into Budapest. Street fighting escalated in response to the Russian show of force. In an attempt to quell the disturbances, Communist Party officials in Hungary appointed Imre Nagy (who had earlier fallen out of favor with Party members) as the new premier. Nagy asked the Soviets to withdraw their troops from the capital so that he could restore order. Russian forces complied and withdrew from Budapest by November 1, but tensions remained high.



Oct 23, 1976:
Chicago has its first #1 hit with "If You Leave Me Now"

Chicago—one of history's most prolific rock bands—has its first #1 hit on October 23, 1976, with "If You Leave Me Now."

The rock band Chicago churned out full-length albums at a rate that's never been surpassed by a pop group of their stature. Not only did the group release nine albums in their first seven years of existence (1969-75), but among those nine releases were four double albums and one quadruple album, Chicago at Carnegie Hall (1971). That's 16 LPs in seven years, all of them selling at an incredible rate, which means that in terms of sheer tonnage, Chicago probably shipped more vinyl than any other American rock band in the 1970s. It was a feat made all the more incredible by the fact that the members of Chicago could have walked through O'Hare Airport at the height of their success without attracting so much as a single screaming fan.

It's not that Chicago's fans didn't love them, for the certainly did. But the collective ethos of the band was to keep individual egos out of things, even to the point of using a logo rather than a picture of the band on nearly every one of their albums. "Chicago is the most successful experiment in group therapy ever to go down in history," founding member Robert Lamm has said. Critics may never have embraced the group's jazzy, middle-of-the road sound, but with upwards of 150 million albums sold worldwide, it's impossible to refute the quantitative argument for Chicago's greatness.

Chicago's success as album-sellers may overshadow their success on the singles charts, but not by very much. "If You Leave Me Now" became their first #1 hit on this day in 1976, but the group had already placed nine singles in the Billboard Top 10 by the time that Peter Cetera-penned ballad reached the top of the charts. Among those early hits were "25 Or 6 To 4" (1970), "Saturday In The Park" (1972) and "Just You 'N' Me" (1973), and many more were to follow. Chicago earned two more #1 hits post-1976 with "Hard To Say I'm Sorry" (1982) and "Look Away" (1988), and seven other Top 10s, including "Baby What A Big Surprise" (1977), "Hard Habit To Break" and "You're The Inspiration" (both 1982).

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 24, 1931:
George Washington Bridge is dedicated

On this day in 1931, eight months ahead of schedule, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicates the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River. The 4,760-foot–long suspension bridge, the longest in the world at the time, connected Fort Lee, New Jersey with Washington Heights in New York City. "This will be a highly successful enterprise," FDR told the assembled crowd at the ceremony. "The great prosperity of the Holland Tunnel and the financial success of other bridges recently opened in this region have proven that not even the hardest times can lessen the tremendous volume of trade and traffic in the greatest of port districts."

Workers built the six-lane George Washington Bridge in sections. They carried the pieces to the construction site by rail, then hauled them into the river by boat, then hoisted them into place by crane. Though the bridge was gigantic, engineer Othmar Amman had found a way to make it look light and airy: in place of vertical trusses, he used horizontal plate girders in the roadway to keep the bridge steady. Amman used such strong steel that these plate girders could be relatively thin and as a result, the bridge deck was only 12 feet deep. From a distance, it looked as flimsy as a magic carpet. Meanwhile, thanks to Amman's sophisticated suspension system, that magic carpet seemed to be floating: The bridge hung from cables made of steel wires--107,000 miles and 28,100 tons of steel wires, to be exact--that were much more delicate-looking than anything anyone had ever seen.

The bridge opened to traffic on October 25, 1931. One year later, it had carried 5 million cars from New York to New Jersey and back again. In 1946, engineers added two lanes to the bridge. In 1958, city officials decided to increase its capacity by 75 percent by adding a six-lane lower level. This deck (the New York Times called it "a masterpiece of traffic engineering," while other, more waggish observers referred to it as the "Martha Washington") opened in August 1962.

Today, the George Washington Bridge is one of the world's busiest bridges. In 2008, it carried some 105,894,000 vehicles.



Oct 24, 1947:
Commuter trains collide in England

Two rush-hour commuter trains collide in South Croydon, England, killing 32 people on this day in 1947. Heavy fog and a serious mistake by a signalman caused the deadly crash.

The fog was even thicker than usual on the morning of October 24 outside London. The train from Tattenham Corner to London Bridge was full, carrying passengers taking their daily trip to work. The train from Haywards Heath into London was also full and the two trains were sharing the same track at certain points in the journey.

In 1947, keeping trains from colliding with each other was the job of signalmen using semaphone signals. A more effective colored-light system was not used in London until shortly after this incident. On this day, the Haywards Heath train stopped at the South Croydon station and was held up there for five minutes. Although the signal system indicated to the signalman on duty that the Tattenham Corner train should stop, the signalman forgot about the Haywards train and the heavy fog obscured his vision of the South Croydon station. Thinking it was safe to proceed, he overrode the system—contrary to procedure—and gave the Tattenham train the all-clear signal.

The Tattenham train came through the South Croydon station at 40 miles per hour, slamming right into the back of the Haywards Heath train. The powerful collision did serious damage to both trains, especially the Tattenham train, the first car of which was crushed. In addition to the 32 people who lost their lives, another 183 were seriously injured and required hospitalization.



Oct 24, 1945:
U.N. formally established

Less than two months after the end of World War II, the United Nations is formally established with the ratification of the United Nations Charter by the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of other signatories.

Despite the failure of the League of Nations in arbitrating the conflicts that led up to World War II, the Allies as early as 1941 proposed establishing a new international body to maintain peace in the postwar world. The idea of the United Nations began to be articulated in August 1941, when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, which proposed a set of principles for international collaboration in maintaining peace and security. Later that year, Roosevelt coined "United Nations" to describe the nations allied against the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan. The term was first officially used on January 1, 1942, when representatives of 26 Allied nations met in Washington, D.C., and signed the Declaration by the United Nations, which endorsed the Atlantic Charter and presented the united war aims of the Allies.

In October 1943, the major Allied powers--Great Britain, the United States, the USSR, and China—met in Moscow and issued the Moscow Declaration, which officially stated the need for an international organization to replace the League of Nations. That goal was reaffirmed at the Allied conference in Tehran in December 1943, and in August 1944 Great Britain, the United States, the USSR, and China met at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., to lay the groundwork for the United Nations. During seven weeks, the delegates sketched out the form of the world body but often disagreed over issues of membership and voting. Compromise was reached by the "Big Three"—the United States, Britain, and the USSR—at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, and all countries that had adhered to the 1942 Declaration by the United Nations were invited to the United Nations founding conference.

On April 25, 1945, the United Nations Conference on International Organization convened in San Francisco with 50 nations represented. Three months later, during which time Germany had surrendered, the final Charter of the United Nations was unanimously adopted and signed by the delegates. The Charter called for the U.N. to maintain international peace and security, promote social progress and better standards of life, strengthen international law, and promote the expansion of human rights.

On October 24, 1945, the U.N. Charter came into force upon its ratification by the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of other signatories. The first U.N. General Assembly, with 51 nations represented, opened in London on January 10, 1946. On October 24, 1949, exactly four years after the United Nations Charter went into effect, the cornerstone was laid for the present United Nations headquarters, located in New York City. Since 1945, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded five times to the United Nations and its organizations and five times to individual U.N. officials.



Oct 24, 1962:
James Brown records breakthrough Live at the Apollo album

James Brown began his professional career at a time when rock and roll was opening new opportunities for black artists to connect with white audiences. But the path he took to fame did not pass through Top 40 radio or through The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand. James Brown would make his appearance in all of those places eventually, but only after a decade spent performing almost exclusively before black audiences and earning his reputation as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. On this day in 1962, he took a major step toward his eventual crossover and conquest of the mainstream with an electrifying performance on black America's most famous stage—a performance recorded and later released as Live at the Apollo (1963), the first breakthrough album of James Brown's career.

By the time 1962 rolled around, James Brown was one of the most popular figures on the R&B scene, not so much on the strength of his recordings, but on the strength of his live act. As he would throughout his long career, Brown ran his band, the Famous Flames, like a military unit, demanding of his instrumentalists and backing vocalists the same perfection he demanded of himself. Even in the middle of a performance, Brown would turn around and dish out fines for missed or flubbed notes, all without missing or flubbing a dance step himself. At the midnight show at the Apollo on October 24, 1962, however, every member of Brown's band knew that the fines they faced would be far greater than normal. "You made a mistake that night," band member Bobby Byrd told Rolling Stone magazine, "the fine would move from five or ten dollars to fifty or a hundred dollars."

The reason was simple. Having failed to convince the head of his label, King Records, to record and release the performance as a live album, James Brown, a man who was famously wise to the value of a dollar, was financing the Apollo recording himself. In the end, the show went off not only without a hitch, but with such success that the famously tough Apollo crowd was in a state of rapture. Released in May 1963, Live at the Apollo ended up spending an astonishing 66 weeks on the Billboard album chart and selling upwards of a million copies, giving James Brown his first smash hit album and setting him on a course for his incredible crossover success in the mid-1960s and beyond.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 25, 1971:
The U.N. seats the People's Republic of China and expels Taiwan

In a dramatic reversal of its long-standing commitment to the Nationalist Chinese government of Taiwan, and a policy of non-recognition of the communist People's Republic of China (PRC), America's U.N. representatives vote to seat the PRC as a permanent member. Over American objections, Taiwan was expelled.

The reasons for the apparently drastic change in U.S. policy were not hard to discern. The United States had come to value closer relations with the PRC more than its historical commitment to Taiwan. U.S. interest in having the PRC's help in resolving the sticky Vietnam situation; the goal of using U.S. influence with the PRC as diplomatic leverage against the Soviets; and the desire for lucrative economic relations with the PRC, were all factors in the U.S. decision. Relations with the PRC thereupon soared, highlighted by President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. Not surprisingly, diplomatic relations with Taiwan noticeably cooled, though the United States still publicly avowed that it would defend Taiwan if it were attacked.



Oct 25, 1983:
United States invades Grenada

President Ronald Reagan, citing the threat posed to American nationals on the Caribbean nation of Grenada by that nation's Marxist regime, orders the Marines to invade and secure their safety. There were nearly 1,000 Americans in Grenada at the time, many of them students at the island's medical school. In little more than a week, Grenada's government was overthrown.

The situation on Grenada had been of concern to American officials since 1979, when the leftist Maurice Bishop seized power and began to develop close relations with Cuba. In 1983, another Marxist, Bernard Coard, had Bishop assassinated and took control of the government. Protesters clashed with the new government and violence escalated. Citing the danger to the U.S. citizens in Grenada, Reagan ordered nearly 2,000 U.S. troops into the island, where they soon found themselves facing opposition from Grenadan armed forces and groups of Cuban military engineers, in Grenada to repair and expand the island's airport. Matters were not helped by the fact that U.S. forces had to rely on minimal intelligence about the situation. (The maps used by many of them were, in fact, old tourist maps of the island.) Reagan ordered in more troops, and by the time the fighting was done, nearly 6,000 U.S. troops were in Grenada. Nearly 20 of these troops were killed and over a hundred wounded; over 60 Grenadan and Cuban troops were killed. Coard's government collapsed and was replaced by one acceptable to the United States.

A number of Americans were skeptical of Reagan's defense of the invasion, noting that it took place just days after a disastrous explosion in a U.S. military installation in Lebanon killed over 240 U.S. troops, calling into question the use of military force to achieve U.S. goals. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration claimed a great victory, calling it the first "rollback" of communist influence since the beginning of the Cold War.



Oct 25, 1415:
Battle of Agincourt

During the Hundred Years' War between England and France, Henry V, the young king of England, leads his forces to victory at the Battle of Agincourt in northern France.

Two months before, Henry had crossed the English Channel with 11,000 men and laid siege to Harfleur in Normandy. After five weeks the town surrendered, but Henry lost half his men to disease and battle casualties. He decided to march his army northeast to Calais, where he would meet the English fleet and return to England. At Agincourt, however, a vast French army of 20,000 men stood in his path, greatly outnumbering the exhausted English archers, knights, and men-at-arms.

The battlefield lay on 1,000 yards of open ground between two woods, which prevented large-scale maneuvers and thus worked to Henry's advantage. At 11 a.m. on October 25, the battle commenced. The English stood their ground as French knights, weighed down by their heavy armor, began a slow advance across the muddy battlefield. The French were met by a furious bombardment of artillery from the English archers, who wielded innovative longbows with a range of 250 yards. French cavalrymen tried and failed to overwhelm the English positions, but the archers were protected by a line of pointed stakes. As more and more French knights made their way onto the crowded battlefield, their mobility decreased further, and some lacked even the room to raise their arms and strike a blow. At this point, Henry ordered his lightly equipped archers to rush forward with swords and axes, and the unencumbered Englishmen massacred the French.

Almost 6,000 Frenchmen lost their lives during the Battle of Agincourt, while English deaths amounted to just over 400. With odds greater than three to one, Henry had won one of the great victories of military history. After further conquests in France, Henry V was recognized in 1420 as heir to the French throne and the regent of France. He was at the height of his powers but died just two years later of camp fever near Paris.



Oct 25, 1854:
Charge of the Light Brigade

In an event alternately described as one of the most heroic or disastrous episodes in British military history, Lord James Cardigan leads a charge of the Light Brigade cavalry against well-defended Russian artillery during the Crimean War. The British were winning the Battle of Balaclava when Cardigan received his order to attack the Russians. His cavalry gallantly charged down the valley and were decimated by the heavy Russian guns, suffering 40 percent casualties. It was later revealed that the order was the result of confusion and was not given intentionally. Lord Cardigan, who survived the battle, was hailed as a national hero in Britain.



Oct 25, 1980:
Australian rock gods AC/DC earn their first Top 40 hit with "You Shook Me All Night Long"

On October 25, 1980, AC/DC earn their first pop Top 40 hit with "You Shook Me All Night Long."

Back when they were releasing albums like Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap (1977), AC/DC would have seemed an unlikely candidate to become one of the top-selling pop-music acts of all time. But over the course of the coming decades, that's exactly what these Australian rock gods became, and not by keeping pace with changes in musical fashion, but by sticking steadfastly to a musical style and business strategy that have helped the group stand the test of time.

With a hard and loud sound now recognized as influencing nearly all heavy metal music that followed, AC/DC quickly earned a loyal following among hard-rock audiences in the mid-to-late 1970s, but it was "You Shook Me All Night Long" that first gave a hint of their mainstream appeal. "You Shook Me All Night Long" was the lead single from what would prove to be AC/DC's biggest-ever album, Back In Black (1980). Their previous release, Highway To Hell (1979) had been the first by the group to land on the U.S. album charts, but the group's planned follow-up was put in jeopardy by the March 1980 death of lead singer Bon Scott, who choked on his own vomit during a bout of heavy drinking. With new singer Brian Johnson put in place just two months later, the group formed in the early 1970s by brothers Malcolm and Angus Young recorded Back In Black in the summer of 1980. The album would spend a solid year on the U.S. album charts, spawning a second Top 40 hit in the form of its title track and a sports-stadium anthem in the form of "Hells Bells" and ultimately selling more than 20 million copies worldwide.

AC/DC would never have another single as popular as "You Shook Me All Night Long," but the group's ongoing ability to sell full-length rock albums—even in an era when digital downloads have decimated album sales across all genres— is utterly without parallel. The group's commercial success has been credited, in part, to their refusal to allow their song catalog to be cannibalized and repackaged into compilation albums. Whatever the reason, however, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, AC/DC rank as the 10th-highest-selling recording artists of all time with 71 million albums sold—30 million fewer than Led Zeppelin, but roughly five million more than both the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith and nearly 15 million more than both Metallica and Van Halen.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 26, 1881:
Shootout at the OK Corral

On this day in 1881, the Earp brothers face off against the Clanton-McLaury gang in a legendary shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.

After silver was discovered nearby in 1877, Tombstone quickly grew into one of the richest mining towns in the Southwest. Wyatt Earp, a former Kansas police officer working as a bank security guard, and his brothers, Morgan and Virgil, the town marshal, represented "law and order" in Tombstone, though they also had reputations as being power-hungry and ruthless. The Clantons and McLaurys were cowboys who lived on a ranch outside of town and sidelined as cattle rustlers, thieves and murderers. In October 1881, the struggle between these two groups for control of Tombstone and Cochise County ended in a blaze of gunfire at the OK Corral.

On the morning of October 25, Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury came into Tombstone for supplies. Over the next 24 hours, the two men had several violent run-ins with the Earps and their friend Doc Holliday. Around 1:30 p.m. on October 26, Ike's brother Billy rode into town to join them, along with Frank McLaury and Billy Claiborne. The first person they met in the local saloon was Holliday, who was delighted to inform them that their brothers had both been pistol-whipped by the Earps. Frank and Billy immediately left the saloon, vowing revenge.

Around 3 p.m., the Earps and Holliday spotted the five members of the Clanton-McLaury gang in a vacant lot behind the OK Corral, at the end of Fremont Street. The famous gunfight that ensued lasted all of 30 seconds, and around 30 shots were fired. Though it's still debated who fired the first shot, most reports say that the shootout began when Virgil Earp pulled out his revolver and shot Billy Clanton point-blank in the chest, while Doc Holliday fired a shotgun blast at Tom McLaury's chest. Though Wyatt Earp wounded Frank McLaury with a shot in the stomach, Frank managed to get off a few shots before collapsing, as did Billy Clanton. When the dust cleared, Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were dead, and Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday were wounded. Ike Clanton and Claiborne had run for the hills.

Sheriff John Behan of Cochise County, who witnessed the shootout, charged the Earps and Holliday with murder. A month later, however, a Tombstone judge found the men not guilty, ruling that they were "fully justified in committing these homicides." The famous shootout has been immortalized in many movies, including Frontier Marshal (1939), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994).



Oct 26, 1998:
Hurricane Mitch slams into Central America

Hurricane Mitch hits Central America on this day in 1998. The storm, the most deadly hurricane to hit the Western Hemisphere in more than 200 years, went on to kill thousands of people.

The storm formed on October 8 off the west coast of Africa. For 10 days it grew larger, slowly making its way across the Atlantic Ocean. On October 18, still only a tropical storm, Mitch entered the Caribbean. At the time, the storm provoked relatively little concern, but by October 24, it reached hurricane status with the help of unseasonably warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. By the next day, Mitch was a Category 5 storm battering southern Mexico with torrential rains.

Hurricane Mitch then bore down on Central America, forcing the evacuation of 75,000 people from Belize City. As it made landfall, the storm began moving very slowly and unpredictably. In areas where the storm stalled, rainfall in excess of 50 inches was recorded. Flash floods and mudslides were the deadly result of overwhelming rains.

Honduras and Nicaragua were worst hit by Hurricane Mitch. In Honduras, flooded rivers completely isolated the city of San Pedro Sula. The water levels reached 10 feet in large towns such as Tegucigalpa. Not only were thousands killed but nearly three-quarters of the country's crops were destroyed, a huge economic loss. The worst single incident of the disaster took place in Posoltega, Nicaragua, where 2,000 people perished in a huge mudslide. The town of Casitas was also virtually wiped off the map by a mudslide.

Making matters even worse, 10 more people were killed when a plane carrying missionaries to assist in the relief efforts crashed in Guatemala. Additional assistance was sent from around the world. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was particularly helpful in restoring access to areas that had been cut off by the hurricane.

In total, somewhere between 11,000 and 18,000 people are believed to have died because of the hurricane, making Hurricane Mitch the most deadly storm since the Great Hurricane of 1780. Nearly 1 million people lost their homes and the region suffered an estimated $4 billion in damages.



Oct 26, 1944:
Battle of Leyte Gulf ends

After four days of furious fighting, the World War II Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest air-naval battle in history, ends with a decisive American victory over the Japanese.

With the U.S. liberation of the Philippines underway, the desperate Japanese command decided to gamble their combined naval fleet to repulse the Americans. On October 23, the enemy fleets collided, and hundreds of warships and thousands of aircraft battled for control of the Gulf of Leyte in three simultaneous battles. On October 26, what remained of the devastated Japanese fleet retreated, leaving the Allies in control of the Pacific Ocean.

After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Allies waged an escalating bombing campaign against the Japanese home islands, finally forcing Japan's surrender in August 1945.



Oct 26, 1985:
Whitney Houston earns her first #1 hit with "Saving All My Love For You"

Talent, good looks and connections in high places—that's a combination that might spell success for almost any aspiring pop star, and Whitney Houston had all three. Both beautiful and talented, Houston was the daughter of soul singer Cissy Houston and niece of pop star Dionne Warwick, and she parlayed her hereditary gifts and the professional nurturing of her well-connected family into superstardom of a kind rarely matched before or since. A near-unknown prior to the release of her debut album Whitney Houston, she shot to stardom when her first chart-topping hit, "Saving All My Love For You," hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1985.

Written by the team of Michael Masser and Gerry Goffin, who had teamed up previously on Diana Ross' 1975 #1 hit "Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To)," the ballad "Saving All My Love For You" was the second single from Whitney Houston, following "You Give Good Love," which peaked at #3 on the pop charts in July 1985. Released as a single in August 1985, "Saving All My Love" eventually earned Whitney Houston a 1986 Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. When the next two singles from her debut album—"How Will I Know" and "Greatest Love Of All"—also topped the pop charts in early 1986, 23-year-old Whitney Houston established herself as one of the biggest names in popular music.

Over the course of the next decade, Whitney Houston would sell tens of millions of albums and earn eight more #1 hits—a figure eclipsed only by Mariah Carey among solo female recording artists. But only one of Houston's albums—1992's soundtrack to The Bodyguard, featuring the monumentally successful cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You"—would match her 25 million-selling debut in terms of commercial impact. Nearly two years in the making under the personal guidance of Arista Records chief Clive Davis, Whitney Houston ranks among the 40 biggest sellers of all times, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. It also served to launch the career of a singer who became popular enough to earn a top-20 pop hit with "The Star Spangled Banner" not once, but twice—in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, and again 10 years later in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In the late 1990s, Houston's personal struggles began to overshadow her professional achievements, amid rumors of substance abuse issues and erractic behavior. On February 11, 2012–the night before the annual Grammy Award ceremony–the 48-year-old Houston was found unconscious in the her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles and was later pronounced dead.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 27, 1904:
New York City subway opens

At 2:35 on the afternoon of October 27, 1904, New York City Mayor George McClellan takes the controls on the inaugural run of the city's innovative new rapid transit system: the subway.

While London boasts the world's oldest underground train network (opened in 1863) and Boston built the first subway in the United States in 1897, the New York City subway soon became the largest American system. The first line, operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), traveled 9.1 miles through 28 stations. Running from City Hall in lower Manhattan to Grand Central Terminal in midtown, and then heading west along 42nd Street to Times Square, the line finished by zipping north, all the way to 145th Street and Broadway in Harlem. On opening day, Mayor McClellan so enjoyed his stint as engineer that he stayed at the controls all the way from City Hall to 103rd Street.

At 7 p.m. that evening, the subway opened to the general public, and more than 100,000 people paid a nickel each to take their first ride under Manhattan. IRT service expanded to the Bronx in 1905, to Brooklyn in 1908 and to Queens in 1915. Since 1968, the subway has been controlled by the Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA). The system now has 26 lines and 468 stations in operation; the longest line, the 8th Avenue "A" Express train, stretches more than 32 miles, from the northern tip of Manhattan to the far southeast corner of Queens.

Every day, some 4.5 million passengers take the subway in New York. With the exception of the PATH train connecting New York with New Jersey and some parts of Chicago's elevated train system, New York's subway is the only rapid transit system in the world that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No matter how crowded or dirty, the subway is one New York City institution few New Yorkers—or tourists—could do without.



Oct 27, 1994:
U.S. prison population exceeds one million

The U.S. Justice Department announces that the U.S. prison population has topped one million for the first time in American history. The figure—1,012,851 men and women were in state and federal prisons—did not even include local prisons, where an estimated 500,000 prisoners were held, usually for short periods. The recent increase, due to tougher sentencing laws, made the United States second only to Russia in the world for incarceration rates.

Of the characteristics of the prison population, the vast majority of prisoners were male and behind bars on drug-related convictions, while there was an extremely disproportional number of African Americans behind bars compared with their distribution in American society as a whole—more than half the nation's prisoners were African American, while African Americans made up only 13 percent of the overall U.S. population. This racial imbalance was also present in the 2,890 prisoners under sentence of death in 1994—42 percent of the prisoners on death row were African American.



Oct 27, 1970:
Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber release Jesus Christ Superstar

From the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, it was common for original cast recordings of successful Broadway musicals to find their way up near the top of the pop album charts. Hit shows like West Side Story, The Sound of Music and Funny Girl, among several others, all spun off million-selling albums during this era, but by the late 1960s, the pop album charts had been decisively taken over by rock. It was in this environment that a young British composer and his lyricist partner managed to achieve a massive success by precisely reversing the old formula. On this day in 1970, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who would go on to become the most successful composer-lyricist team in modern theater history, released a double-LP "concept" album called Jesus Christ Superstar, which only later would become the smash-hit Broadway musical of the same name.

Jesus Christ Superstar was the third musical written by Lloyd Webber and Rice, following on The Likes of Us, which was staged for the first time in 2005, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which saw only limited performances in various English churches between 1968 and 1970. Superstar grew out of Tim Rice's longtime fascination with Judas Iscariot, whom he conceived not as a craven betrayer of Jesus, but rather as a dear friend struggling with the implications of Jesus' growing celebrity. Although the musical would later find broad support among leaders of liberal Christian churches, it was nevertheless too controversial to gain the financial backing necessary for a stage production. Lloyd Webber and Rice therefore chose to package Superstar as an album first.

Working with a cast that included Murray Head—later of the pop hit "One Night In Bangkok" (1985)—in the role of Judas, and Yvonne Elliman—of the 1977 #1 hit "If I Can't Have You"—as Mary Magdalene, Lloyd Webber and Rice recorded the Jesus Christ Superstar album in the summer of 1970 and released it in Britain and the United States the following fall.

Then as now, Lloyd Webber and Rice had their detractors in the critical establishment. Writing for The New York Times, critic Don Heckman questioned whether this new "rock opera" deserved praise either as rock or as an opera. "As rock, it leaves much to be desired," he wrote. And in relation to 20th-century operas by the likes of Stravinsky and Gershwin, Heckman argued, "The comparison is pretty devastating."

Nevertheless the Jesus Christ Superstar album spawned a Top 40 single in versions of "I Don't Know How To Love Him" by both Yvonne Elliman and Helen Reddy, and it shot all the way to the top of the Billboard album charts in early 1971, paving the way for a smash Broadway opening later that year.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 28, 1965:
Gateway Arch completed

On this day in 1965, construction is completed on the Gateway Arch, a spectacular 630-foot-high parabola of stainless steel marking the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on the waterfront of St. Louis, Missouri.

The Gateway Arch, designed by Finnish-born, American-educated architect Eero Saarinen, was erected to commemorate President Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and to celebrate St. Louis' central role in the rapid westward expansion that followed. As the market and supply point for fur traders and explorers—including the famous Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—the town of St. Louis grew exponentially after the War of 1812, when great numbers of people began to travel by wagon train to seek their fortunes west of the Mississippi River. In 1947-48, Saarinen won a nationwide competition to design a monument honoring the spirit of the western pioneers. In a sad twist of fate, the architect died of a brain tumor in 1961 and did not live to see the construction of his now-famous arch, which began in February 1963. Completed in October 1965, the Gateway Arch cost less than $15 million to build. With foundations sunk 60 feet into the ground, its frame of stressed stainless steel is built to withstand both earthquakes and high winds. An internal tram system takes visitors to the top, where on a clear day they can see up to 30 miles across the winding Mississippi and to the Great Plains to the west. In addition to the Gateway Arch, the Jefferson Expansion Memorial includes the Museum of Westward Expansion and the Old Courthouse of St. Louis, where two of the famous Dred Scott slavery cases were heard in the 1860s.

Today, some 4 million people visit the park each year to wander its nearly 100 acres, soak up some history and take in the breathtaking views from Saarinen's gleaming arch.



Oct 28, 1886:
Statue of Liberty dedicated

The Statue of Liberty, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States, is dedicated in New York Harbor by President Grover Cleveland.

Originally known as "Liberty Enlightening the World," the statue was proposed by the French historian Edouard de Laboulaye to commemorate the Franco-American alliance during the American Revolution. Designed by French sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the 151-foot statue was the form of a woman with an uplifted arm holding a torch. Its framework of gigantic steel supports was designed by Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, the latter famous for his design of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

In February 1877, Congress approved the use of a site on New York Bedloe's Island, which was suggested by Bartholdi. In May 1884, the statue was completed in France, and three months later the Americans laid the cornerstone for its pedestal in New York Harbor. In June 1885, the dismantled Statue of Liberty arrived in the New World, enclosed in more than 200 packing cases. Its copper sheets were reassembled, and the last rivet of the monument was fitted on October 28, 1886, during a dedication presided over by President Cleveland and attended by numerous French and American dignitaries.

On the pedestal was inscribed "The New Colossus," a sonnet by American poet Emma Lazarus that welcomed immigrants to the United States with the declaration, "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. / I lift my lamp beside the golden door." In 1892, Ellis Island, adjacent to Bedloe's Island, opened as the chief entry station for immigrants to the United States, and for the next 32 years more than 12 million immigrants were welcomed into New York harbor by the sight of "Lady Liberty." In 1924, the Statue of Liberty was made a national monument, and in 1956 Bedloe's Island was renamed Liberty Island. The statue underwent a major restoration in the 1980s.



Oct 28, 1919:
Congress enforces prohibition

Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson's veto. The Volstead Act provided for the enforcement of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, also known as the Prohibition Amendment.

The movement for the prohibition of alcohol began in the early 19th century, when Americans concerned about the adverse effects of drinking began forming temperance societies. By the late 19th century, these groups had become a powerful political force, campaigning on the state level and calling for national liquor abstinence. In December 1917, the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the "manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes," was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. In January 1919, the 18th amendment achieved the necessary two-thirds majority of state ratification, and prohibition became the law of the land.

The Volstead Act, passed nine months later, provided for the enforcement of prohibition, including the creation of a special unit of the Treasury Department. Despite a vigorous effort by law-enforcement agencies, the Volstead Act failed to prevent the large-scale distribution of alcoholic beverages, and organized crime flourished in America. In 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was passed and ratified, repealing prohibition.



Oct 28, 1998:
President Bill Clinton signs the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law

According to an ABC news report, it was none other than the pop icon Prince himself who happened upon a 29-second home video of a toddler cavorting to a barely audible background soundtrack of his 1984 hit "Let's Go Crazy" and subsequently instigated a high-profile legal showdown involving YouTube, the Universal Music Group and a Pennsylvania housewife named Stephanie Lenz. Like the lawsuits that eventually shut down Napster, the case involved a piece of federal legislation that has helped establish a legal minefield surrounding the use of digital music in the age of the Internet. That legislation, called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on this day in 1998.

The DMCA bill was heavily supported by the content industries—Hollywood, the music business and book publishers—during its legislative journey through the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The DMCA was written in order to strengthen existing federal copyright protections against new threats posed by the Internet and by the democratization of high technology. But included in the legislation as it was eventually enacted was a "safe harbor" provision granting companies operating platforms for user-contributed content protection from liability for acts of copyright infringement by those users. It was this provision that the operators of file-sharing platforms like Grokster and Napster tried to hide behind during their unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves against DMCA-inspired litigation in the early 2000s.

The DMCA explicitly authorized copyright holders to issue "takedown" notices to individuals or companies believed to be engaging in infringing use of a copyrighted work. The allegation of infringing use in the case of the "Let's Go Crazy" toddler came from Universal Music Group acting in its capacity as Prince's music publisher in June 2007, and YouTube responded by immediately removing the offending video along with roughly 200 others also deemed by Universal to be in violation of the law. Stephanie Lenz appealed YouTube's takedown of her home video on the basis that the barely audible Prince clip conformed with the long-established doctrine of Fair Use. The video was restored when Universal failed to file a formal infringement lawsuit against Lenz within two weeks, but the legal thicket created by the DMCA has yet to be fully resolved by the courts or by Congress.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 29, 1998:
John Glenn returns to space

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 mission, he served as part of a NASA study on health problems associated with aging.

Glenn, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, was among the seven men chosen by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1959 to become America's first astronauts. A decorated pilot, he had flown nearly 150 combat missions during World War II and the Korean War. In 1957, he made the first nonstop supersonic flight across the United States, flying from Los Angeles to New York in three hours and 23 minutes.

In April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space, and his spacecraft, Vostok 1, made a full orbit before returning to Earth. Less than one month later, American Alan B. Shepard, Jr., became the first American in space when his Freedom 7 spacecraft was launched on a suborbital flight. American "Gus" Grissom made another suborbital flight in July, and in August Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov spent more than 25 hours in space aboard Vostok 2, making 17 orbits. As a technological power, the United States was looking very much second-rate compared with its Cold War adversary. If the Americans wanted to dispel this notion, they needed a multi-orbital flight before another Soviet space advance arrived.

On February 20, 1962, NASA and Colonel John Glenn accomplished this feat with the flight of Friendship 7, a spacecraft that made three orbits of the Earth in five hours. Glenn was hailed as a national hero, and on February 23 President John F. Kennedy visited him at Cape Canaveral. Glenn later addressed Congress and was given a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

Out of a reluctance to risk the life of an astronaut as popular as Glenn, NASA essentially grounded the "Clean Marine" in the years after his historic flight. Frustrated with this uncharacteristic lack of activity, Glenn turned to politics and in 1964 announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate from his home state of Ohio and formally left NASA. Later that year, however, he withdrew his Senate bid after seriously injuring his inner ear in a fall from a horse. In 1970, following a stint as a Royal Crown Cola executive, he ran for the Senate again but lost the Democratic nomination to Howard Metzenbaum. Four years later, he defeated Metzenbaum, won the general election, and went on to win reelection three times. In 1984, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president.

In 1998, Glenn attracted considerable media attention when he returned to space aboard the space shuttle Discovery. In 1999, he retired from his U.S. Senate seat after four consecutive terms in office, a record for the state of Ohio.



Oct 29, 1956:
Israel invades Egypt; Suez Crisis begins

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 by Egyptian leader General Gamal Abdel Nasser in July 1956. The situation had been brewing for some time. Two years earlier, the Egyptian military had begun pressuring the British to end its military presence (which had been granted in the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty) in the canal zone. Nasser's armed forces also engaged in sporadic battles with Israeli soldiers along the border between the two nations, and the Egyptian leader did nothing to conceal his antipathy toward the Zionist nation. Supported by Soviet arms and money, and furious with the United States for reneging on a promise to provide funds for construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile River, Nasser ordered the Suez Canal seized and nationalized. The British were angry with the move and sought the support of France (which believed that Nasser was supporting rebels in the French colony of Algeria), and Israel (which needed little provocation to strike at the enemy on its border), in an armed assault to retake the canal. The Israelis struck first, but were shocked to find that British and French forces did not immediately follow behind them. Instead of a lightening strike by overwhelming force, the attack bogged down. The United Nations quickly passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire.

The Soviet Union began to issue ominous threats about coming to Egypt's aid. A dangerous situation developed quickly, one that the Eisenhower administration hoped to defuse before it turned into a Soviet-U.S. confrontation. Though the United States sternly warned the Soviet Union to stay out of the situation, Eisenhower also pressured the British, French, and Israeli governments to withdraw their troops. They eventually did so in late 1956 and early 1957.



Oct 29, 1929:
Stock market crashes

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 of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression.

During the 1920s, the U.S. stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929, a period of wild speculation. By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stocks in great excess of their real value. Among the other causes of the eventual market collapse were low wages, the proliferation of debt, a weak agriculture, and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated.

Stock prices began to decline in September and early October 1929, and on October 18 the fall began. Panic set in, and on October 24—Black Thursday—a record 12,894,650 shares were traded. Investment companies and leading bankers attempted to stabilize the market by buying up great blocks of stock, producing a moderate rally on Friday. On Monday, however, the storm broke anew, and the market went into free fall. Black Monday was followed by Black Tuesday, in which stock prices collapsed completely.

After October 29, 1929, stock prices had nowhere to go but up, so there was considerable recovery during succeeding weeks. Overall, however, prices continued to drop as the United States slumped into the Great Depression, and by 1932 stocks were worth only about 20 percent of their value in the summer of 1929. The stock market crash of 1929 was not the sole cause of the Great Depression, but it did act to accelerate the global economic collapse of which it was also a symptom. By 1933, nearly half of America's banks had failed, and unemployment was approaching 15 million people, or 30 percent of the workforce. It would take World War II, and the massive level of armaments production taken on by the United States, to finally bring the country out of the Depression after a decade of suffering.



Oct 29, 1966:
"96 Tears" becomes a #1 hit for the enigmatic and influential ? and the Mysterians

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 space alien he claims to be—a claim from which he has never backed down? What is abundantly clear is that ? has managed to maintain an intriguing air of mystery about him during his 40-plus years in the public eye, and that air of mystery has in turn helped earn him recognition among fans as one of the flat-out coolest individuals ever to cut a hit record. Known to his friends as "Q," the man officially named ? rose to fame with his band the Mysterians when their song "96 Tears" came out of nowhere to reach the top of the Billboard pop chart on this day in 1966.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 30, 1775:
Naval committee established by Congress

On this day in 1775, the Continental Congress appoints seven members to serve on an administrative naval committee tasked with the acquisition, outfitting and manning of a naval fleet to be used in defense against the British. Almost two weeks earlier, on October 13, 1775, Congress had authorized the construction and arming of vessels for the country's first navy.

Members of the first naval committee included some of the most influential members of the Continental Congress and several "founding fathers," including John Adams, Joseph Hewes, John Langdon, Richard Henry Lee, Silas Deane and Stephen Hopkins, the committee's chairman.

On December 22, Esek Hopkins, Stephen's brother, was appointed the first commander in chief of the Continental Navy. Congress also named four captains to the new service: Dudley Saltonstall, Abraham Whipple, Nicholas Biddle and John Burrows Hopkins. Their respective vessels, the 24-gun frigates Alfred and Columbus, and the14-gun brigs Andrew Doria and Cabot, as well as three schooners, the Hornet, the Wasp and the Fly, became the first ships of the Navy's fleet. Five first lieutenants, including future American hero John Paul Jones, five second lieutenants and three third lieutenants also received their commissions.

With help from the committee, America's first navy went from a fleet of two vessels on the day Congress established the naval committee to a fleet of more than 40 armed ships and vessels at the height of the War for Independence. The Continental Navy successfully preyed upon British merchant shipping and won several victories over British warships. This first naval force was disbanded after the war. What is now known as the United States Navy was formally established with the creation of the federal Department of the Navy in April 1798.



Oct 30, 1893:
The World's Columbian Exposition closes in Chicago

October 30, 1893 is the last day of Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition, a great fair that celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World and offered fairgoers a chance to see the first gas-powered motorcar in the United States: the Daimler quadricycle. The exposition introduced Americans to all kinds of technological wonders—for instance, an alternating-current power plant, a 46-foot-long cannon, a 1,500-pound Venus de Milo made of chocolate, and Juicy Fruit gum—along with replicas of exotic places and carnival-style rides and games.

Four years earlier, the Universal Exposition in Paris had featured an elaborate display of steam- and gas-powered vehicles, including the Serpollet-Peugeot steam tricar, named for its three wheels and powered by a coke-burning boiler and a lightweight, petrol-fueled four-wheeled car built by the German engineer Gottlieb Daimler. The Chicago fair promised an even more impressive spectacle. Its Transportation Building, designed by Louis Sullivan, was crammed full: Pack mules and horse-drawn carts crowded next to bicycles and boats. Most exciting of all were the rows of massive American-built steam locomotives that towered over everything else in the hall. Trains, the Exposition's organizers seemed to say, were the transportation of the future.

Only one internal-combustion vehicle was on display at the fair, tucked away in the corner of the Transportation Building: another of the wire-wheeled, tiller-steered, one-cylinder platform quadricycles that Daimler had introduced to Parisian fairgoers in 1889. It was like nothing most Americans had ever seen and yet almost no one paid any attention to it. Reporters barely mentioned the Daimler car and it didn't even appear in the exhibition catalog.

But a few very important people did notice it and studied it closely. One was the bicycle mechanic Charles Duryea, who used the Daimler car as the inspiration for the four-wheeled, one-cylinder Motor Wagon that he built with his brother Frank. In 1896, the Duryea Motor Wagon Company became the first company to mass-produce gas-powered vehicles in the United States.

Another admirer of the Daimler car was Henry Ford, who returned to Dearborn after the fair and built an internal-combustion quadricycle of his own. (He called it his "gasoline buggy.") Ford drove his little car for the first time on July 4, 1896 and sold it later that year for $200. Just a few years later, he incorporated the Ford Motor Company and the automobile age had begun.



Oct 30, 1991:
Perfect storm hits North Atlantic

On this day in 1991, the so-called "perfect storm" hits the North Atlantic producing remarkably large waves along the New England and Canadian coasts. Over the next several days, the storm spread its fury over the ocean off the coast of Canada. The fishing boat Andrea Gail and its six-member crew were lost in the storm. The disaster spawned the best-selling book The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger and a blockbuster Hollywood movie of the same name.

On October 27, Hurricane Grace formed near Bermuda and moved north toward the coast of the southeastern United States. Two days later, Grace continued to move north, where it encountered a massive low pressure system moving south from Canada. The clash of systems over the Atlantic Ocean caused 40-to-80-foot waves on October 30—unconfirmed reports put the waves at more than 100 feet in some locations. This massive surf caused extensive coastal flooding, particularly in Massachusetts; damage was also sustained as far south as Jamaica and as far north as Newfoundland.

The storm continued to churn in the Atlantic on October 31; it was nicknamed the "Halloween storm." It came ashore on November 2 along the Nova Scotia coast, then, as it moved northeast over the Gulf Stream waters, it made a highly unusual transition into a hurricane. The National Hurricane Center made the decision not to name the storm for fear it would alarm and confuse local residents. It was only the eighth hurricane not given a name since the naming of hurricanes began in 1950.

Meanwhile, as the storm developed, the crew of the 70-foot fishing boat Andrea Gail was fishing for swordfish in the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic. The Andrea Gail was last heard from on October 28. When the boat did not return to port on November 1 as scheduled, rescue teams were sent out.

The week-long search for the Andrea Gail and a possible cause of its demise were documented in Junger’s book, which became a national bestseller. Neither the Andrea Gail nor its crew—David Sullivan and Robert Shatford of Gloucester, Mass.; William Tyne, Dale Murphy and Michael Moran of Bradenton Beach, Fla.; and Alfred Pierre of New York City—was ever found.



Oct 30, 1944:
Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring premieres at the Library of Congress

Born and raised in the same urban, early-20th-century milieu that produced Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George and Ira Gershwin, the great and quintessentially American composer Aaron Copland was trained in the classics but steeped in the jazz and popular Jewish music that surrounded him in childhood. As a young composer, his stated aim was to write music that would "make you feel like you were alive on the streets of Brooklyn." Ironically, it was music that brilliantly evoked the rural American heartland that made Copland famous. One such work—arguably his greatest—was the score for the ballet Appalachian Spring, which became one of the most recognizable and beloved pieces of American music ever written almost immediately following its world premiere on this day in 1944.

The score for Appalachian Spring was commissioned in 1942 to accompany a ballet being choreographed by a young Martha Graham. Copland would know the work only as "Ballet for Martha" throughout its composition, having no guidance other than that the ballet would have some sort of a "frontier" theme. In fact, the name Appalachian Spring and the setting of western Pennsylvania would be decided on only after Copland had completed his score. Yet somehow, without having had any idea of doing so, Copland had composed a work that audiences and critics alike found brilliantly evocative of the specific time and place referenced in the title.

The most recognizable passage of Appalachian Spring is the portion Aaron Copland adapted from the Shaker song "Simple Gifts"—"'This a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free"—which was largely unfamiliar to Americans prior to Copland's adaptation. Copland's artful incorporation of the folk tradition with his distinctly modern sensibility is what made Appalachian Spring the transcendent work that it is. In its review of the October 30, 1944, premiere, the New York Times praised all elements of the "shining and joyous" work: the choreography by Martha Graham; the set design by the Isamu Noguchi; and the score by Aaron Copland, which it called "the fullest, loveliest and most deeply poetical of all his theater scores....It is, as the saying goes, a natural."

Though written expressly for the ballet and for only 13 instrumentalists—a limitation dictated by the size of the orchestra pit at the Library of Congress—Appalachian Spring was soon adapted into an orchestral suite, which is the form in which it became widely popular. Appalachian Spring was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1945.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Oct 31, 1517:
Martin Luther posts 95 theses

On this day in 1517, the priest and scholar Martin Luther approaches the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nails a piece of paper to it containing the 95 revolutionary opinions that would begin the Protestant Reformation.

In his theses, Luther condemned the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the papal practice of asking payment—called "indulgences"—for the forgiveness of sins. At the time, a Dominican priest named Johann Tetzel, commissioned by the Archbishop of Mainz and Pope Leo X, was in the midst of a major fundraising campaign in Germany to finance the renovation of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Though Prince Frederick III the Wise had banned the sale of indulgences in Wittenberg, many church members traveled to purchase them. When they returned, they showed the pardons they had bought to Luther, claiming they no longer had to repent for their sins.

Luther's frustration with this practice led him to write the 95 Theses, which were quickly snapped up, translated from Latin into German and distributed widely. A copy made its way to Rome, and efforts began to convince Luther to change his tune. He refused to keep silent, however, and in 1521 Pope Leo X formally excommunicated Luther from the Catholic Church. That same year, Luther again refused to recant his writings before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Germany, who issued the famous Edict of Worms declaring Luther an outlaw and a heretic and giving permission for anyone to kill him without consequence. Protected by Prince Frederick, Luther began working on a German translation of the Bible, a task that took 10 years to complete.

The term "Protestant" first appeared in 1529, when Charles V revoked a provision that allowed the ruler of each German state to choose whether they would enforce the Edict of Worms. A number of princes and other supporters of Luther issued a protest, declaring that their allegiance to God trumped their allegiance to the emperor. They became known to their opponents as Protestants; gradually this name came to apply to all who believed the Church should be reformed, even those outside Germany. By the time Luther died, of natural causes, in 1546, his revolutionary beliefs had formed the basis for the Protestant Reformation, which would over the next three centuries revolutionize Western civilization.



Oct 31, 1776:
King speaks for first time since independence declared

On this day in 1776, in his first speech before British Parliament since the leaders of the American Revolution came together to sign of the Declaration of Independence that summer, King George III acknowledges that all was not going well for Britain in the war with the United States.

In his address, the king spoke about the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the revolutionary leaders who signed it, saying, "for daring and desperate is the spirit of those leaders, whose object has always been dominion and power, that they have now openly renounced all allegiance to the crown, and all political connection with this country." The king went on to inform Parliament of the successful British victory over General George Washington and the Continental Army at the Battle of Long Island on August 27, 1776, but warned them that, "notwithstanding the fair prospect, it was necessary to prepare for another campaign."

Despite George III's harsh words, General William Howe and his brother, Admiral Richard Howe, still hoped to convince the Americans to rejoin the British empire in the wake of the colonists' humiliating defeat at the Battle of Long Island. The British could easily have prevented Washington's retreat from Long Island and captured most of the Patriot officer corps, including the commander in chief. However, instead of forcing the former colonies into submission by executing Washington and his officers as traitors, the Howe brothers let them go with the hope of swaying Patriot opinion towards a return to the mother country.

The Howe brothers' attempts at negotiation failed, and the War for Independence dragged on for another four years, until the formal surrender of the British to the Americans on October 19, 1781, after the Battle of Yorktown.



Oct 31, 1956:
British and French troops land in Suez Canal zone

Two days after Israeli sent forces into Egypt initiating the Suez Crisis, British and French military forces join them in the canal zone to try to retake the canal. Originally, forces from the three countries were set to strike at once, intent on foiling Egypt's plans to nationalize the canal, but the British and French troops were delayed. The entry of Britain and France into the struggle nearly brought the Soviet Union into the conflict, and seriously damaged their relationships with the United States.

Behind schedule, but ultimately successful, the British and French forces took control of the area around the Suez Canal. However, their hesitation had given the Soviet Union-also confronted with a growing crisis in Hungary--time to respond. The Soviets, eager to exploit Arab nationalism and gain a foothold in the Middle East, supplied arms from Czechoslovakia to the Egyptian government beginning in 1955, and eventually helped Egypt construct the Aswan Dam on the Nile River after the United States refused to support the project. Soviet leader Khrushchev railed against the invasion and threatened to rain down nuclear missiles on Western Europe if the Israeli-French-British force did not withdraw.

The Eisenhower administration's response was measured. It warned the Soviets that reckless talk of nuclear conflict would only make matters worse, and cautioned Khrushchev to refrain from direct intervention in the conflict. However, Eisenhower also gave stern warnings to the French, British, and Israelis to give up their campaign and withdraw from Egyptian soil. Eisenhower was personally furious with the British, in particular, for not keeping the United States informed about their intentions. The United States threatened all three nations with economic sanctions if they persisted in their attack. The threats did their work. The British and French forces withdrew by December; Israel finally bowed to U.S. pressure in March 1957. While the U.S. action helped to avoid an escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, the damage to relations with France, Britain, and Israel took years to repair.



Oct 31, 1963:
Ed Sullivan witnesses Beatlemania firsthand, paving the way for the British Invasion

In the autumn of 1963, Beatlemania was a raging epidemic in Britain, and it was rapidly spreading across the European continent. But in the United States, where the likes of Bobby Vinton and Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs sat atop the pop charts, John, Paul, George and Ringo could have walked through Grand Central Terminal completely unnoticed. It wasn't Grand Central that the Beatles were trying to walk through on this day in 1963, however—it was Heathrow Airport, London, where they'd just returned from a hugely successful tour of Sweden. Also at Heathrow that particular day, after a talent-scouting tour of Europe, was the American television impresario Ed Sullivan. The pandemonium that Sullivan witnessed as he attempted to catch his flight to New York would play a pivotal role in making the British Invasion possible.

It wasn't for lack of trying that the Beatles were still unknown in the United States. Their manager Brian Epstein had tried and failed repeatedly to convince Capitol Records, the American arm of their British label EMI, to release the singles that had already taken Europe by storm. Convinced that the Merseybeat sound wouldn't translate across the Atlantic, Capitol declined to release "Please Please Me," "From Me to You" and "She Loves You," allowing all three to be released on the minor American labels Vee-Jay and Swan and to languish on the pop charts without any promotion. Desperate to crack the American market, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote a song explicitly tailored to the American market and recorded it just two weeks before their fateful indirect encounter with Ed Sullivan. That song was "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

Ed Sullivan had his staff make inquiries about the Beatles following his return to the United States, and Brian Epstein arranged to travel to New York to open negotiations. And in what surely must rank as one of the greatest one-two punches in the history of professional talent-management, Epstein convinced The Ed Sullivan Show to have the Beatles as headliners for three appearances rather than as a one-time, mid-show novelty act, and he then leveraged that contract into an agreement by Capitol Records to release "I Want To Hold Your Hand" in the United States and back it with a $40,000 promotional campaign.

As a result of the chance encounter at Heathrow on this day in 1963, and of Brian Epstein's subsequent coup in New York, the Beatles would arrive in the United States on February 7, 1964, with a #1 record already to their credit. The historic Ed Sullivan appearances that followed would lead to five more in the next 12 months.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Nov 1, 1512:
Sistine Chapel ceiling opens to public

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, one of Italian artist Michelangelo's finest works, is exhibited to the public for the first time.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, the greatest of the Italian Renaissance artists, was born in the small village of Caprese in 1475. The son of a government administrator, he grew up in Florence, a center of the early Renaissance movement, and became an artist's apprentice at age 13. Demonstrating obvious talent, he was taken under the wing of Lorenzo de' Medici, the ruler of the Florentine republic and a great patron of the arts. After demonstrating his mastery of sculpture in such works as the Pieta (1498) and David (1504), he was called to Rome in 1508 to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—the chief consecrated space in the Vatican.

Michelangelo's epic ceiling frescoes, which took several years to complete, are among his most memorable works. Central in a complex system of decoration featuring numerous figures are nine panels devoted to biblical world history. The most famous of these is The Creation of Adam, a painting in which the arms of God and Adam are stretching toward each other. In 1512, Michelangelo completed the work.

After 15 years as an architect in Florence, Michelangelo returned to Rome in 1534, where he would work and live for the rest of his life. That year saw his painting of the The Last Judgment on the wall above the altar in the Sistine Chapel for Pope Paul III. The massive painting depicts Christ's damnation of sinners and blessing of the virtuous and is regarded as a masterpiece of early Mannerism.

Michelangelo worked until his death in 1564 at the age of 88. In addition to his major artistic works, he produced numerous other sculptures, frescoes, architectural designs, and drawings, many of which are unfinished and some of which are lost. In his lifetime, he was celebrated as Europe's greatest living artist, and today he is held up as one of the greatest artists of all time, as exalted in the visual arts as William Shakespeare is in literature or Ludwig van Beethoven is in music.



Nov 1, 1952:
United States tests first hydrogen bomb

The United States detonates the world's first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, on Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific. The test gave the United States a short-lived advantage in the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. Following the successful Soviet detonation of an atomic device in September 1949, the United States accelerated its program to develop the next stage in atomic weaponry, a thermonuclear bomb. Popularly known as the hydrogen bomb, this new weapon was approximately 1,000 times more powerful than conventional nuclear devices. Opponents of development of the hydrogen bomb included J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. He and others argued that little would be accomplished except the speeding up of the arms race, since it was assumed that the Soviets would quickly follow suit.The opponents were correct in their assumptions. The Soviet Union exploded a thermonuclear device the following year and by the late 1970s, seven nations had constructed hydrogen bombs. The nuclear arms race had taken a fearful step forward.



Nov 1, 1755:
Earthquake takes heavy toll on Lisbon

A devastating earthquake hits Lisbon, Portugal, killing as many as 50,000 people, on this day in 1755. The city was virtually rebuilt from scratch following the widespread destruction.

Lisbon was Portugal’s capital and largest city during the prosperous 18th century, when diamonds and gold from the Portuguese colony in Brazil made many in the country wealthy. About 10 percent of Portugal’s 3 million people lived in Lisbon and, as one of the biggest ports on the Atlantic Ocean, the city played a critical role in world trade. In 1755, Lisbon was also a major center of Catholicism and was home to Catholic religious authorities.

On All Saints Day, three tremors over the course of 10 minutes suddenly struck Lisbon. The worst of the quakes is thought to have had a magnitude of 8.0, though this is just an estimate as no recording equipment existed at the time. The shaking was felt as far away as Morocco.

The devastating effects of the earthquake were felt throughout the city. Close to the coast, a 20-foot tsunami rushed ashore and killed thousands. Many people were observing All Saints Day in churches at the time and died when the buildings collapsed. Fires broke out all over the city and winds spread the flames quickly. The royal palace was destroyed, as were thousands of homes. Much of the country’s cultural history, preserved in books, art and architecture, was wiped away in an instant. Many of the city’s residents, including hundreds of escaped prisoners, fled Lisbon immediately. The death toll has been estimated at between 10,000 and 50,000.

The Marquis of Pombal was assigned the task of rebuilding the city. The twisting narrow streets that had once made up Lisbon were replaced by broad avenues. The reconstruction also featured one of the first uses of prefabricated buildings. While the rebuilding was a notable success, some used the tragedy for their own purposes. Religious authorities proclaimed that the earthquake was caused by the wrath of God, brought on the city because of its sins. The famous author Voltaire, who witnessed the quake, parodied this line of thinking—along with those who insist that everything that happens is for the best—in the book Candide.



Nov 1, 1993:
European Union goes into effect

The Maastricht Treaty comes into effect, formally establishing the European Union (EU). The treaty was drafted in 1991 by delegates from the European Community meeting at Maastricht in the Netherlands and signed in 1992. The agreement called for a strengthened European parliament, the creation of a central European bank, and common foreign and security policies. The treaty also laid the groundwork for the establishment of a single European currency, to be known as the "euro."

By 1993, 12 nations had ratified the Maastricht Treaty on European Union: Great Britain, France, Germany, the Irish Republic, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Austria, Finland, and Sweden became members of the EU in 1995. After suffering through centuries of bloody conflict, the nations of Western Europe were finally united in the spirit of economic cooperation.



Nov 1, 1986:
Boston's belated Third Stage hits #1

Fans by the millions pledged their allegiance to Boston back when the group's debut album and their massive hit single, "More Than A Feeling," ruled the airwaves in America's bicentennial year. But then the once-great nation of Boston fans waited—and waited—while their favorite band managed just one more album over the next 10 years. Not one to be rushed, producer and lead guitarist Tom Scholz, an MIT-educated perfectionist, tinkered with Boston's third album for the better part of a decade before finally releasing it in 1986. Late though it may have been in coming, Boston's Third Stage blasted straight to the top of the pop album charts, reaching the #1 spot on the Billboard 200 on this day in 1986.

But if long-suffering Boston fans who cued Third Stage up on their turntables were somewhat confused by what they heard, they could be forgiven. Far from reflecting a creative evolution of the kind one might expect after eight years of silence, Boston's long-awaited third album sounded almost identical to their first two: Boston (1976) and Don't Look Back (1978). In fact, Tom Scholz completed "Amanda"—the #1 single that powered Third Stage up the album charts—way back in 1980. But in his own words, "It set a standard for everything else I had to do... I felt I had to complete the album in a way that would do justice to that song."

But Tom Scholz was up to more than just writing, recording and relentlessly re-recording the songs on Third Stage during the eight years between it and Don't Look Back. In addition to shedding himself of his former band mates until the point that Boston was virtually a one-man band, Scholz was busy running a company he founded in 1980 called Scholz Research and Development. Putting his engineering degree to work, Scholz and his team developed a tiny and hugely popular guitar amplifier called the Rockman, the success of which helped fund production on Third Stage. It also helped cover legal fees incurred by Scholz in fending off a $20 million lawsuit filed by CBS, the record label he'd kept waiting all those years for Boston's contractually obligated third album.