On this date..

Emma Nutt

In 1878, Emma M. Nutt of Boston becomes the first woman telephone operator. Prior to that time, most telephone operators had been teenage boys, who customers weren't thrilled with because they were gruff, played jokes and swore.

In 1772, Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa forms in California

In 1773, "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," a collection of poems by the enslaved Phillis Wheatley, was published in London.

In 1775, Richard Penn and Arthur Lee, representing the Continental Congress, present the so-called Olive Branch Petition to the Earl of Dartmouth. Britain’s King George III, however, refused to receive the petition, which, written by John Dickinson, appealed directly to the king and expressed hope for reconciliation between the colonies and Great Britain.

In 1777, Samuel Mason, a Patriot captain in command of Fort Henry on the Ohio frontier, survives an attack on the fort by Native American allies of the British.

In 1798, 1st US bank robbery: the Bank of Pennsylvania at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia robbed of $162,821

In 1807, Aaron Burr acquitted of charges of plotting to set up an empire

In 1836, Narcissa Whitman, one of the first white women to settle west of the Rocky Mountains, arrives at Walla Walla, Oregon Country (now US state of Washington)

In 1864, as Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman tightened the noose on Atlanta, Georgia, shelling civilians and cutting off supply lines, General John Bell Hood commanded his Confederates forces to retreat.

In 1869, Construction begins on the Grand Central Depot for Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York and Harlem Railroad (later replaced by Grand Central Station, and then by Grand Central Terminal)

In 1897, the first section of Boston’s new subway was opened, creating the first underground rapid transit system in North America.

In 1898, First forestry school in America opens at Biltmore Estate, North Carolina.

In 1914, the passenger pigeon, once one of the most abundant bird species on Earth, went extinct as the last known example, named Martha, died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo.

In 1942, US Federal judge upholds detention of Japanese-Americans.

In 1952, Life magazine published Ernest Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, his last major work of fiction; it was also released as a book, and in 1953 it won a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1985, a U.S.-French expedition located the wreckage of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean roughly 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.

In 2015, invoking “God’s authority,” Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis denied marriage licenses to gay couples again in direct defiance of the federal courts and vowed not to resign, even under the pressure of steep fines or jail. (Davis would spend five days in jail as a result, and is currently appealing a ruling ordering her to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in related legal fees.)