Also on this day
Lead Story
1890
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...
American Revolution
1776
On this day in 1776, Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris receive information that the French are going to purchase arms and ammunition in Holland and send them to the West Indies for use by the American Patriots. Meanwhile, Silas Deane, the secret congressional agent in France, wrote to Congress pleading...
Automotive
1908
On October 1, 1908, the first production Model T Ford is completed at the company’s Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit. Between 1908 and 1927, Ford would build some 15 million Model T cars. It was the longest production run of any automobile model in history until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed...
Civil War
1864
Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow drowns off the North Carolina coast when a Yankee craft runs her ship aground. She was returning from a trip to England. At the beginning of the war, Maryland native Rose O’Neal Greenhow lived in Washington, D.C., with her four children. Her deceased husband was wealthy...
Cold War
1949
Naming himself head of state, communist revolutionary Mao Zedong officially proclaims the existence of the People’s Republic of China; Zhou Enlai is named premier. The proclamation was the climax of years of battle between Mao’s communist forces and the regime of Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek, who had been...
1988
Having forced the resignation of Soviet leader Andrei Gromyko, Mikhail Gorbachev names himself head of the Supreme Soviet. Within two years, he was named “Man of the Decade” by Time magazine for his role in bringing the Cold War to a close. Beginning in 1985, when he became...
Crime
1993
Polly Klaas is abducted at knifepoint by an intruder in her Petaluma, California, home during a slumber party with two friends. Despite a massive manhunt and national attention, there was no sign of the missing 12-year-old or her abductor for two months. Eventually, investigators found some children’s clothing in the northern...
Disaster
1987
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...
General Interest
1918
A combined Arab and British force captures Damascus from the Turks during World War I, completing the liberation of Arabia. An instrumental commander in the Allied campaign was T.E. Lawrence, a legendary British soldier known as Lawrence of Arabia.Lawrence, an Oxford-educated Arabist born in Tremadoc, Wales, began working for the...
1936
During the Spanish Civil War, General Francisco Franco is named head of the rebel Nationalist government in Spain. It would take more than two years for Franco to defeat the Republicans in the civil war and become ruler of all of Spain. He subsequently served as dictator until his death...
1946
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...
1965
A communist coup against Indonesian President Sukarno is crushed by General Mohammed Suharto, the Indonesian army chief of staff. In the aftermath, Suharto moved to replace Sukarno and launched a purge of Indonesian communists that resulted in thousands of deaths. In 1967, Suharto assumed full executive authority and in 1968...
2005
On this day in 2005, suicide bombers strike three restaurants in two tourist areas on the Indonesian island of Bali, a popular resort area. The bombings killed 22 people, including the bombers, and injured more than 50 others. This was the second suicide-bombing incident to rock the island in less...
Hollywood
1962
On this day in 1962, Johnny Carson takes over from Jack Paar as host of the late-night talk program The Tonight Show. Carson went on to host The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for three decades, becoming one of the biggest figures in entertainment in the 20th century. John William Carson...
Literary
1856
On this day, the Revue de Paris publishes the first segment of Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. The novel was published in installments from this day until December 15, 1856. The novel, about the romantic illusions of a country doctor’s wife and her adulterous liaisons, scandalized French traditionalists. Flaubert was brought...
2013
On this day in 2013, espionage and military thriller author Tom Clancy, whose books include “The Hunt for Red October” and “Patriot Games,” dies in Baltimore at age 66 following a brief illness. During a career that spanned nearly 30 years, Clancy penned more than two dozen novels, a number...
Music
1920
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,...
Old West
1890
On this day in 1890, the United States Congress decrees that about 1,500 square miles of public land in the California Sierra Nevada will be preserved forever as Yosemite National Park. Once the home to Indians whose battle cry Yo-che-ma-te (“some among them are killers”) gave the park its name, Anglo-Americans...
Presidential
1924
On this day in 1924, future President James Earl Carter is born in Plains, Georgia. Carter, who preferred to be called “Jimmy,” was the son of a peanut farmer and was the first president to be born in a hospital. Carter was raised a devoted Southern Baptist and graduated from...
Vietnam War
1961
On this day, South Vietnam requests a bilateral defense treaty with the United States. President John F. Kennedy was faced with a serious dilemma in Vietnam. The government of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon was increasingly unpopular with the South Vietnamese people because of his refusal to institute political...
World War I
1918
At four o’clock on the morning of October 1, 1918, Max von Baden arrives in Berlin to take office as the new German chancellor, after conflict within the German military and government leadership causes his predecessor, Georg von Hertling, to resign. Although the Allies had breached the mighty Hindenburg Line—the heavily...
World War II
1944
On this day in 1944, the first of two sets of medical experiments involving castration are performed on homosexuals at the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany. Buchenwald was one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazi regime. Constructed in 1937, it was a complement to camps north (Sachsenhausen)...