On this date....

Boston Proclamation

In 1636, Harvard University, the oldest institute of higher learning in the United States, was founded by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

In 1646, First Protestant church assembly for American Indians established in Massachusetts.

In 1726, Gulliver’s Travels" is first published.

In 1775, British General William Howe's Proclamation ordered the City of Boston closed. Under this proclamation no person was allowed to leave the city and citizens were ordered to organize into military companies.

In 1775, With winter approaching, Washington urges officers and soldiers to spend their wages wisely—not on coats, but on essentials like shirts, shoes, stockings, and leather breeches. Congress, he explains, will provide uniform coats and waistcoats at cost.

In 1776, At the Battle of White Plains, New York, Washington's troops are in prepared defense positions in a line of hills behind the village of While Plains.

In 1790, New York gives up claims to Vermont for $30,000

In 1793, Eli Whitney applied for a patent for the cotton gin.

In 1858, Rowland Hussey Macy opened his first New York store at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan.

In 1886, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland. 

In 1919, The U.S. Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto and passed the Volstead Act, providing enforcement guidelines for Prohibition.

In 1921, Governor Lynn Frazier loses to Ragnvald A. Nestos by just over 4,000 votes (1.8%) in the first American gubernatorial recall election held in North Dakota

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rededicated the Statue of Liberty on its 50th anniversary.

In 1954, Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Ernest Hemingway.

In 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev informed the United States that he had ordered the dismantling of missile bases in Cuba; in return, the U.S. secretly agreed to remove nuclear missiles from U.S. installations in Turkey.

In 1965, The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, designed by Finnish-born American architect Eero Saarinen to commemorate St. Louis's historic role as “Gateway to the West,” was completed.

In 1980, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan asked voters during a debate with President Jimmy Carter in Cleveland "are you better off than you were four years ago?"

In 1991, what became known as “The Perfect Storm” began forming hundreds of miles east of Nova Scotia; lost at sea during the storm were the six crew members of the Andrea Gail, a fishing boat from Gloucester, Massachusetts.

In 1992, Duluth, Minnesota mayor Gary Doty cuts the ribbon at the mouth of the brand-new, 1,480-foot–long Leif Erickson Tunnel on Interstate 35. With the opening of the tunnel, that highway—which stretches 1,593 miles—was finished at last. As a result, the federal government announced, the Interstate Highway System itself was 99.7 percent complete.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton signs into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The legislation was written in order to strengthen existing federal copyright protections against new threats posed by the Internet and by the democratization of high technology.

In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney's top adviser, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, resigned after he was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements in the CIA leak investigation. (Libby was convicted and sentenced to 30 months in prison. President George W. Bush commuted his sentence.)

In 2016, the FBI dropped what amounted to a political bomb on the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton when it announced it was investigating whether emails on a device belonging to disgraced ex-congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of one of Clinton’s closest aides, Huma Abedin, might contain classified information.