On this date....

Envelope Folding Machine

In 1607 1st Protestant Episcopal parish in America was established at Jamestown.

In 1776, A threat inside New York is coming to light. A secret committee of the New York Provincial Congress issues a warrant for David Mathews, Loyalist mayor of New York City. Mathews stands accused of “dangerous designs and treasonable conspiracies” against the American cause. Washington forwarded the warrant to Nathanael Greene, directing him to execute it with precision at 1 a.m. the next morning. Suspicions include recruitment of Continental soldiers, sabotage, and even rumors of danger to Washington himself.

In 1779, Spain declared war on Great Britain, creating a de facto alliance with the Americans.

In 1788, the US Constitution was officially ratified when New Hampshire became the ninth state to approve it.

In 1805, the Great Stone Face, or the Profile, was found in New Hampshire.

In 1810, 26-year-old Zachary Taylor married Margaret Smith, age 31, in her sister’s log house in Louisville, Kentucky.

In 1834, Cyrus McCormick received a patent for his 1831 invention of a reaper.

In 1853, the envelope-folding machine was patented by Russell Hawes in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In 1862, Union and Confederate forces skirmished at the Chickahominy Creek during the Peninsular Campaign.

In 1863, on the second day of fighting, Confederate cavalry failed to dislodge a Union force at the Battle of LaFourche Crossing in Louisiana.

In 1864, A joint Confederate Army-Navy long-range bombardment opened on the Union squadron in the James River at Trent’s and Varina Reache.

In 1877, the Molly Maguires, ten Irish immigrants, were hanged at the Schuylkill County and Carbon County, Pennsylvania prisons for alleged terrorism and murders in the anthracite coalfields.

In 1879, Frank Winfield Woolworth opened his first successful “Woolworth’s Great Five Cent Store” on North Queen Street, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

In 1893, the world’s first Ferris wheel opened to the public at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Standing some 264 feet (80.5 meters) tall, the enormous revolving steel wheel was designed by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., and could carry 2,160 passengers at a time.

In 1898, Guam became a US territory.

In 1900, General Arthur MacArthur offered amnesty to Filipinos rebelling against American rule.

In 1904, the US Republican Party nominated Theodore Roosevelt for President, but not without opposition from those whom he calls ‘malefactors of great wealth’

In 1913, just 4 feet tall and 80 pounds, pioneering aviatrix Tiny Broadwick became the first woman to parachute from a plane. On the way up, she was suspended from a trap seat outside the cockpit, with her parachute on a shelf above her.

In 1915, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Guinn v. United States, 238 US 347, striking down an Oklahoma law denying some citizens the right to vote.

In 1916, the controversial US military expedition against Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa brought the United States and Mexico closer to war when Mexican government troops attacked US Brigadier General John J. Pershing’s force at Carrizal, Mexico.

In 1921, US Army Air Service pilots bombed the captured German battleship Ostfriesland to demonstrate the effectiveness of aerial bombing.

In 1923, Marcus Garvey was sentenced to 5 years for using the mail to defraud investors in his Black Star Line shipping enterprise.

In 1939, the New York Yankees announced Lou Gehrig’s retirement after doctors revealed he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS.

In 1940, 130 years after former President Zachary Taylor married his wife on this date, Richard Milhous Nixon married Patricia Ryan.

In 1942, an Imperial Japanese submarine fired shells at Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast, but caused little damage.

In 1942, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived at Hyde Park for the hastily convened Second Washington Conference.

In 1945, Japanese resistance on Okinawa was finally quelled, less than three months after US troops landed there as the last stepping-stone before the planned assault on Japan’s main islands in World War II.

In 1948, Columbia Records unveils the 33-1/3 rpm LP phonograph record, invented by Peter Carl Goldmark, allowing up to 20 minutes per side (available in 10 and 12-inch diameters) at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, NYC; over the next decade, its popularity and profitability push the 78 rpm record out of production [1]

In 1954, scientists of the American Cancer Society presented a study to a meeting of the American Medical Association in San Francisco, which found that men who regularly smoked cigarettes died, particularly from lung cancer, at a considerably higher rate than non-smokers.

In 1956, Playwright Arthur Miller defies the House Committee on Un-American Activities and refuses to name suspected communists.

In 1964, civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi; their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later. (Forty-one years later, on this date in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, was found guilty of manslaughter in their deaths; he was sentenced to 60 years in prison, where he died in January 2018.)

In 1968, US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren announced he would resign once a successor was found.

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that states may ban materials found to be obscene according to local standards.

In 1975, Jim and Naomi Olive were brutally killed by their high school-aged daughter’s boyfriend, a waterbed salesman. Their bodies are later cremated in a barbecue pit.

In 1977, former White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman entered prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up.

In 1982, John Hinckley, Jr., was ruled to be innocent by reason of insanity in the shooting of US President Ronald Reagan.

In 1985, American, Brazilian, and West German scientists announced that skeletal remains exhumed in Brazil were those of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

In 1989, a sharply divided Supreme Court ruled, in Texas v. Johnson, that burning the American flag as a form of political protest was protected by the First Amendment.

In 1997, the Women’s National Basketball Association debuted with the league’s first game, in which the New York Liberty defeated the Los Angeles Sparks.

In 2000, US Senator Daniel K. Inouye and 19 other Japanese-American WWII veterans of the 442nd Regiment were belatedly awarded the Medal of Honor by President Bill Clinton.

In 2001, Frida Kahlo was the first Hispanic woman honored on a US postage stamp.

In 2001, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicted 13 Saudis and a Lebanese in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 American servicemen.

In 2004, the aircraft SpaceShipOne made the first privately funded human spaceflight.

In 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty to charges of plotting a failed car bombing in New York’s Times Square. (Shahzad was later sentenced to life in prison.)

In 2022, A Los Angeles jury found Bill Cosby liable for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old at the Playboy Mansion and awarded the victim $500,000.