2005—Canada OK’s same-sex marriage; the world does not end.
2004—Janet Jackson’s nipple is briefly bared on TV; the world nearly ends.
2003—The space shuttle Columbia disintegrates over Texas.
1991—A tower screwup results in a 737 landing on a turboprop at LAX; 35 die, but David Koch survives.
1974—Richard Nixon meets for twenty minutes with the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
1968—In Saigon, AP photographer and former Marine Eddie Adams snaps the anti-Iwo Jima Flag Raising photo of the Vietnam War: General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting VC Captain Nguyen Van Lem, whose hands are tied, in the head.
1964—Filthy-minded Governor of Indiana Matthew E. Welsh declares The Kingsmen’s song “Louie Louie,” which everyone else finds incomprehensible, to be obscene.
1963—Fleetwood Linley, the last living person to have looked upon the face of the dead Abraham Lincoln, dies at the age of 75.
1960—Civil rights sit-ins begin at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C.
1951—An inevitable confluence: the first television broadcast of an atomic explosion.
1926—Col. Billy Mitchell, the lone U.S. military officer who understands the potential of aircraft in warfare, is court-martialled for criticizing his “superiors.”