On this date...

Alice Huyler Ramsey

In 1628, the first deportation from what is now the US: Thomas Morton was deported from Massachusetts.

In 1732, a Royal charter for Georgia was granted to British military officer and philanthropist James Oglethorpe.

In 1772, the first naval attack of the Revolutionary War took place in Providence, Rhode Island.

In 1772, the first Protestant church west of Pennsylvania (in Ohio) held communion.

In 1776, Unbeknownst to Washington, the British fleet had begun departing Halifax. Their destination is New York City.

In 1776, Washington pressed Joseph Trumbull, the Continental Army’s commissary general, to rush meat and flour toward Albany, warning that shortages would worsen as reinforcements arrived. To John Hancock, Washington again asked Congress to offer more generous terms so that soldiers would reenlist for longer periods.

In 1822, Charles Graham of New York patented porcelain false teeth.

In 1856, 500 Mormons left Iowa City, Iowa, and headed west for Salt Lake City, Utah, carrying all their possessions in two-wheeled handcarts.

In 1862, the US Civil War - Battle of Port Republic, the last of 5 battles in Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, was won by the Confederates.

In 1870, US President Ulysses S. Grant met with Sioux Chief Red Cloud at the White House in Washington, D.C.

In 1893, the interior of the ramshackle Ford’s Theatre collapsed, causing the deaths of 22 people. The building—where President Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865—houses hundreds of clerks employed by the War Department’s Records and Pensions Division. An investigation determined that the cause of the tragedy was a pier that had given way during excavation in the basement for an electric-light plant.

In 1894, a contractor drilling a water well for the City of Corsicana instead discovered the first oilfield in Texas to produce significant amounts of oil and gas.

In 1902, Woodrow Wilson was unanimously elected president of Princeton University, a position he held until he resigned in 1910 to run for governor of New Jersey. As university president, Wilson exhibited both the idealistic integrity and the occasional lack of political acumen that marked his tenure as the twenty-eighth president of the United States (1913-21).

In 1909, Alice Huyler Ramsey, a 22-year-old housewife from Hackensack, New Jersey, became the 1st woman to drive across the US, in a Maxwell 30, drives 3,800 miles from Manhattan to San Francisco in 59 days.

In 1915, US President Woodrow Wilson sent a second Lusitania note to Germany protesting the sinking of the Lusitania and refuting the German claim that the British blockade was illegal.

In 1915, William Jennings Bryan quit as US Secretary of State.

In 1928, Charles Kingsford-Smith & Charles Ulm are 1st to fly across the Pacific when they ended their flight from California to Brisbane.

In 1930, Chicago Tribune reporter and closet racketeer Jake Lingle was shot at close range and killed at the Illinois Central train station, allegedly over a $100,000 USD gambling debt owed to Al Capone; mobster Leo Brothers was convicted of the murder.

In 1931, Robert Goddard patented the first rocket-powered aircraft design.

In 1935, Donald Duck waddles into pop culture, debuting in Disney’s “The Wise Little Hen.” In it, the irascible quacker and his pal Peter Pig try to avoid work by faking stomach aches until Mrs. Hen teaches them the value of labor.

In 1943, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Current Tax Payment Act into law, requiring taxes to be withheld from workers’ wages and paid directly to the federal government.

In 1949, Georgia Neese Clark of Kansas becomes 1st woman treasurer of the US.

In 1954, Joseph Welch asked US Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” during Senate-Army hearings.

In 1964, in reply to a formal question submitted by President Lyndon B. Johnson—“Would the rest of Southeast Asia necessarily fall if Laos and South Vietnam came under North Vietnamese control?”—the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) submitted a memo that effectively challenges the “domino theory” backbone of the Johnson administration policies. This theory contended that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, the rest of Southeast Asia would also fall “like dominoes,” and the theory had been used to justify much of the Vietnam War effort.

In 1969, the Senate confirmed Warren Burger to be chief justice of the United States, succeeding Earl Warren.

In 1970, Harry Blackmun was sworn in as a US Supreme Court Justice.

In 1972, heavy rains triggered record flooding in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The resulting disaster left at least 238 people dead and more than 1,300 homes destroyed.

In 1973, American racehorse Secretariat won the Belmont Stakes (by an unprecedented 31 lengths) to capture the Triple Crown; he had earlier won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes.

In 1978, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints struck down a policy of excluding Black men from the Mormon priesthood that had been in place for more than 125 years.

In 1986, brothers Jack and Charles Colbert were found guilty in a New York courtroom of running what they called a “surplus chemical business” and what the U.S. government called a notorious global toxic-waste brokerage. The brothers had shipped 238 drums of waste to a chemical company in Zimbabwe, claiming the drums contained valuable industrial solvents. But the drums actually contained “garbage” from a chemical company in Ohio.

In 1986, the Rogers Commission released its report on the Challenger disaster, criticizing NASA and rocket-builder Morton Thiokol for management problems leading to the explosion that claimed the lives of seven astronauts.

In 1988, US Attorney General Edwin Meese overruled the Board of Immigration Appeals and ordered Provisional Irish Republican Army member Joseph Doherty deported to the United Kingdom.

In 2008, American baseball player Ken Griffey, Jr., hit his 600th career home run, becoming the sixth player in major league history to accomplish the feat.

In 2013, Edward Snowden publicly made his identity known as the leaker of NSA documents.

In 2022, at its first public hearing on the matter, the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol placed blame squarely on Donald Trump, saying the assault was not spontaneous but an “attempted coup” and a direct result of the defeated president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.