1883 – US and Canadian railroads set and synchronize four standard time zones – Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific – replacing over 100.
1902 – Brooklyn toymaker Morris Michtom names the teddy bear after President Teddy Roosevelt.
1926 – George Bernard Shaw accepts the Nobel Prize for Literature but refuses the prize money, saying “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a friend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize”
1928 – Walt Disney’s “Steamboat Willie” released. It’s the first Mickey Mouse sound cartoon.
1938 – Trade union members elect John L. Lewis as the first president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
1949 – National League batting leader Jackie Robinson, who hit .342, wins Most Valuable Player award.
1956 – Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev says “we will bury you!” to Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow.
1959 – “Ben Hur” directed by William Wyler and starring Charleston Heston premieres in New York City (Academy Awards Best Film 1960)
1961 – President John Kennedy sends 18,000 military advisors to South Vietnam.
1963 – Bell telephone introduces the touch-tone telephone to customers in Pennsylvania.
1964 – FBI director J. Edgar Hoover describes Martin Luther King Jr. as a “most notorious liar”
1970 – Johnny Bench wins National League Most Valuable Player.
1978 – In Jamestown, Guyana, 918 members of the Peoples Temple are murdered or commit suicide under the leadership of cult leader Jim Jones.
1979 – 29th NASCAR Series Cup: Richard Petty is the first person to win seven times.
1984 – NBC premiere of the first part of fact-based crime mystery “Fatal Vision”, based on Joe McGinnis’ novel about Army Capt. Jeffrey MacDonald and the 1970 murder of his then-pregnant wife and two children on Fort Bragg, N.C.
1990 – National Football League’s New York Giants beat Detroit Lions 20-0 to run record to 10-0.
1999 – In College Station, Texas, 12 are killed and 27 injured at Texas A&M University when a massive bonfire under construction collapses.
2005 – 20th Century Fox releases “Walk the Line”, starring Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter, and directed by James Mangold. Witherspoon wins an Academy Award.
2015 – American singer-songwriter Willie Nelson receives Library of Congress Gershwin Prize at the Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C.
2019 – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reverses US policy regarding Israeli West Bank settlements as illegal after 24 years.
2020 – US COVID-19 death toll passes 250,000, recorded cases at 11.5 million, hospitalizations at 76,830 amid a country-wide surge.
About Author
