How often we greet a friend with a question of how they spent the day before. I decided to see how the world spent yesterday through the years and, although I didn’t put down everything I found, a lot was going on ‘yesterday’ down through the years.
1763 – Samuel Johnson 1st meets his future biographer James Boswell in London
1771 – The Battle of Alamance, a pre-American Revolutionary War battle between local militia and a group of rebels called “The Regulators”, occurs in present-day Alamance County, North Carolina.
1804 – French Senate & Tribune declare Napolean leader of France
1817 – Mississippi River steamboat service begins
1860 – Chicago: Republican convention selects Abraham Lincoln as candidate
1866 – Charles Elmer Hires invents root beer
1869 – Cincinnati Reds play their 1st baseball game, win 41-7
1872 – Metropolitan Gas Company lamps lit for 1st time
1891 – George A Hormel & Co introduce Spam
1911 – Remains of a neanderthal man found on Jersey, Channel Islands
1911 – Zeppelin “Deutscheland” wrecked at Dusseldorf
1918 – The Sedition Act of 1918 is passed by the U.S. Congress, making criticism of the government an imprisonable offense.
1920 – Joan of Arc (Jeanne D’arc) canonized a saint
1939 – Food stamps are 1st issued
1941 – Last great German air attack on Great Britain (Birmingham)
1943 – German troops destroy synagogue of Warsaw
1943 – Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto ends after 30 days of fighting
1944 – 1st of 180,000+ Hungarian Jews reach Auschwitz
1945 – Violent battles around Sugar Loaf/Half Moon, Okinawa
1948 – Chaim Weizmann elected 1st president of Israel
1948 – Israel issues its 1st postage stamps
1951 – The first regularly scheduled transatlantic flights begin between John F Kennedy International Airport in New York City and Heathrow Airport in London, operated by El Al Israel Airlines.
1955 – Heavyweight Rocky Marciano KOs Don Cockell in SF
1956 – Egypt recognizes People’s Republic of China
1957 – Pope Pius XII publishes encyclical Invicti Athletae
1957 – US launches its 3rd atomic submarine, USS Skate, at Groton Conn
1958 – Maj Irwin, USAAF flies a Lockheed Starfight F-104 A to a record 1,404.18 MPH
1960 – Big 4 summit in Paris collapses as USSR levels spy charges against US
1960 – Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
1965 – Bomb destroys USAF base Bien Hoa South Vietnam
1965 – Spaghetti-O’s 1st sold
1971 – 1st class postage now costs 8 cents (was 6 cents)
1974 – Helmut Schmidt becomes West German chancellor1975 – Junko Tabei from Japan becomes 1st woman to reach summit of Mt Everest
1983 – Lebanese parliament accept peace accord with Israel
1985 – Pope John Paul II arrives in Belgium
1986 – Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy) comes back from dead on Dallas
1987 – “Bobro 400”, a barge carrying 3,200 tons of garbage, set sail from NY, beginning an unsuccesful 8-week search for a dumping site
1988 – US Surgeon Gen C Everett Koop reports nicotine as addictive as heroin
1988 – US Supreme Court rules trash may be searched without a warrant
1989 – Soviet president Mikhail S Gorbachev & Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping ended a 30-year rift when they formally met in Beijing
1991 – Daily Planet fires cub reporter Jimmy Olson (Superman character) (fiction!)
1991 – Queen Elizabeth II becomes 1st British monarch to address US congress
1992 – US space shuttle STS-49 lands (maiden voyage of Endeavour)
1995 – Japanese police arrest cult leader Shoko Asahara & charged him with Nerve-gas attack on Tokyo’s subways two months earlier
2003 – In Casablanca, Morocco, 33 civilians are killed and more than 100 people are injured in the Casablanca terrorist attacks.
2004 – The Day of Mourning at Bykivnia forest, just outside of Kiev, Ukraine. Here during 1930s and early 1940s communist bolsheviks executed over 100,000 Ukrainian civilians.
2005 – Kuwait permits women’s suffrage in a 35-23 National Assembly vote.
2011 – Space shuttle Endeavour launches for its final commission in space
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