2005—Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans and the levees break.
1968—Police preserve disorder at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
1963—At the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. calls for freedom to ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire … .
1955—During a visit to family in Money, Miss., fourteen year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till is murdered by whites for speaking to a white woman.
1951—Killed in Korea, John R. Rice is denied burial at a Sioux City cemetery because he’s a Native America.
1947—In Linares, Spain, the fifth bull of the day helps even the score a little by fatally goring Manolete.
1922—WEAF in New York airs the first paid radio commercial.
1921—Ten thousand coal miners and two thousand hired goons start trading lead on Blair Mountain, W.Va.
1919—Resigning as mayor of Seattle, Ole Hanson, the survivor of an assassination attempt, says “hang or incarcerate all anarchists for life.”
1918—Big Bill Haywood and 14 other Wobblies get 20 years for draft obstruction.
1869—The Mount Washington Cog Railway opens for business.
1833—Britain abolishes slavery throughout the Empire.
1831—Rep. Robert Potter [D-N.C.] castrates two men he suspects of having sex with his wife. One, a minister in his 50s, is her cousin.