Friday, August 26

This Day In History

• 1847   Liberia was proclaimed an independent republic.
  
• 1498   The master artist, Michelangelo, was commissioned to make the "Pieta". Originally intended as a monument for his tomb, Michelangelo’s Florentine Pieta has interested historians for centuries because the four- figure sculpture does not feature the perfect proportions that are the hallmark of Michelangelo’s work.
  
• 1842   The U.S. Congress established the fiscal year, which begins on July 1st.
  
• 1873   The first public school kindergarten in the U.S. was authorized by the school board of St. Louis, MO.
  
• 1883   The first of a series of increasingly violent explosions occurred on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa. On the morning of the next day, the world’s largest explosion was heard some three thousand miles away. The volcanic island exploded, spewing five cubic miles of earth into the air -- fifty miles high. It created tidal waves up to 120 feet high, killed 36,000 people and caused oceanic and atmospheric changes over a period of many years.
  
• 1910   Mother Teresa was born Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia.
  
• 1920   The 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was certified by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. The amendment prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex -- in the voting booth. In other words, it gave women in the United States the right to vote. In 1973, Congresswoman Bella Abzug presented a bill to Congress designating this day as Women’s Equality Day. The President issued a proclamation and in 1974 it became Public Law #93-382.
  
• 1939   Major league baseball was televised for the first time as experimental station W2XBS broadcast a doubleheader between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field.
  
• 1957   The Soviet Union announced it had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile.
  
• 1961   The International Hockey Hall of Fame opened in Toronto.
  
• 1964   President Lyndon B. Johnson was nominated for a term of office in his own right at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J.
  
• 1974   Aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh died at age 72.
  
• 1978   Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice was elected the 264th Pope of the Roman Catholic Church following the death of Paul VI. The new pontiff took the name John Paul I.
  
• 1992   A no-fly zone was imposed on southern Iraq. Operation Southern Watch was orchestrated by the United States, France and Britain. The campaign supported U.N. Security Council resolutions containing Iraq, protecting Kuwait, and keeping pressure on Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime.
  
• 2003   Investigators concluded that NASA's overconfident management and inattention to safety doomed the space shuttle Columbia as much as did damage to the craft.
  

Happy Birthday To

• 1838   John Wilkes Booth (actor, assassin: shot and killed U.S. President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC; killed [or committed suicide] Apr 26, 1865)
  
• 1873   Lee DeForest (inventor: held patents for hundreds items including the triode tube: a three element vacuum tube which later became the audion tube: a significant invention that made radio possible; autobiography: ‘Father of Radio’ [1950]; died June 30, 1961)
  
• 1906   Albert Sabin (polio researcher: the Sabin oral polio vaccine; died Mar 03, 1993)
  
• 1935   Geraldine Ferraro (1st woman to be nominated for vice president of the U.S. by a major political party [Democratic Party, 1984])
  
• 1980   Macaulay Culkin (actor: Home Alone series)