2022—A Medal of Freedom given to mobster Meyer Lansky by Pres. Truman sells at auction for $48,000.
2014—The nation suffers irreparable harm; the President wears a tan suit.
2005—Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans and the levees break.
1969—Judith Love Cohen completes the Abort Guidance System—later used to bring Apollo 13 back to Earth—while in labor in the maternity ward, then gives birth to Jack Black.
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 American.
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.”
1869—The Mount Washington Cog Railway opens for business.
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.