This Day In History: August 11, 1964 On this day in history, 1964, what would later be called one of the 100 greatest films of all time by Time Magazine, the Beatles “mockumentary”, A Hard Day’s Night, debuted in the United States. (Warning: There be spoilers in the A Hard Day’s Night facts ahead! So if you haven’t seen it, […]

This Day In History: August 6, 1855 Monday, August 6, 1855 was an election day in Louisville, Kentucky. The political field looked a bit different then, with the two main parties being the Democrats and the Know-Nothings (an offshoot of the Whig Party), but they faced a lot of the same issues that the Democrats and Republicans do today- they […]

This Day In History, April 26, 1986: On this day in history, 1986, the worst nuclear power accident in history occurred in the Ukraine at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.  While many use Chernobyl as a reason why we should abandon nuclear power, the Chernobyl accident wasn’t so much about the inherent danger of nuclear reactors, even given the technology […]

This Day In History: March 29, 1886 On this day in history, 1886, Dr. John Pemberton mixed the first batch of what would soon become Coca-Cola. Pemberton was a pharmacist and also a former Confederate soldier who was wounded in the Battle of Columbus. This subsequently led to him becoming addicted to morphine, as happened to many people at the […]

This Day In History: March 13, 1962 On this day in history, 1962, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer, submitted a proposal to the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, developed by the Joint Chiefs and the Department of Defense, outlining plans to commit various acts of terrorism on U.S. soil and then to frame the […]

This Day In History: January 24, 1848 On this day in history, 1848, James W. Marshall was checking on the progress made the night before in expanding a drainage channel at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California (which at the time was part of the Mexican territory, but just 9 days later would be ceded to the U.S.). Marshall was using […]

This Day In History: January 5, 1825 On this day in history, 1825, on a bitter cold day, a young Alexandre Dumas, soon to be famed playwright and novelist and current son of Thomas-Alaxandre who was once one of Napoleon’s generals, fights in his first duel. During the duel, Dumas successfully defeated his opponent almost immediately, but, according to his […]

This Day In History: January 4, 1965 On this day in history, 1965, CBS purchased the Fender Guitar Company for $13 million from Leo Fender. For reference, this would be around $90 million today. This was also close to $2 million more than CBS paid for the New York Yankees just two years before. After CBS continually reduced the quality […]

This Day In History: December 29, 1890 On this day in history, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry opened fire on a Lakota Native American encampment with four rapid fire Hotchkiss guns, killing 150-300 of the group, including women and children. Along with the dead Lakota, around 25 of the cavalry troops themselves were killed with another 39 wounded, largely due to […]

This Day In History: December 21, 1898 On this day in history, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the radioactive element radium (in the form of radium chloride), extracting it from uraninite. They first removed the uranium from the uraninite sample and then found that the remaining matter was still radioactive, so investigated further. Along with the barium in the […]

This Day In History: December 19, 1973 Much like Orson Welles before him, Johnny Carson once accidentally used his public platform to incite a public panic. On this day in history, 1973, Carson started a near month long toilet paper shortage in the United States. In his show, he stated, “You know what’s disappearing from the supermarket shelves? Toilet paper… […]

This Day In History: December 16, 1916 On this day in history, 1916, the “Mad Monk”, Grigori Rasputin, was murdered by members of the Russian aristocracy. The exact events surrounding his death have given rise to a variety of stories, much of which are probably false. So what actually happened? First, a brief background on Rasputin: Grigori Rasputin was born […]

This Day In History: December 14, 1903 On this day in history, 1903, the Wright brothers took their Wright Flyer out in their first attempt to fly it.  The date of their first attempt would have been a day sooner, but they had promised their dad they would not fly on the Sabbath, so waited until Monday the 14th.  The […]

This Day In History: December 13, 1809 On this day in history, 1809, the woman who would soon become the first to survive an oophorectomy was diagnosed as not being pregnant past term, as she had thought, but having an extremely large tumor, which isn’t that different than a baby when you think about it, but you know… bigger, in […]

This Day In History: December 12, 1901 On this day in history, 1901, Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi’s radio device became the first such device to successfully transmit a signal all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, from Poldhu, Cornwall, UK to Signal Hill in St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada, a span of about 2100 miles.  His receiving device used a […]

This Day In History: December 11, 1972 On this day in history, 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan landed on the moon, becoming the last human beings to walk on the moon.  Throughout the Apollo missions which spanned from 1961 to 1972, a total of 24 people journeyed to the moon with twelve of them getting to […]

On this day in history, December 10 1868:  The first traffic lights are put in place using semaphore arms during the day time and at night using gas lamps with red and green as the traffic light colors.  This was all spurred on because in London, England in 1865 there was a growing concern over the amount of horse-drawn traffic […]