On This Day March 28

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On This Day February 24

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History Highlights
History Highlights

1836 – Under attack by soldiers of the Mexican Army, Colonel William Travis issues an urgent call for reinforcements on behalf of his Texan troops defending the Alamo in Bejar, Texas (San Antonio today).

1868 – Andrew Johnson becomes the first U.S. president to be impeached by the House of Representatives, which charges him with violating the Tenure of Office Act and bringing into “disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt, and reproach the Congress of the United States.” Johnson, who assumed office after the Lincoln assassination, is acquitted three months later in the Senate.

1903 – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt signs a deal with the new government of Cuba to lease 45 square miles at the mouth of Guantanamo Bay for 2,000 gold coins a year.

1909 – The Hudson Motor Car Company is founded. In the mid-1950s, it becomes American Motors, best known for production of the Gremlin and Pacer.

1968 – The Tet Offensive ends as U.S. and South Vietnamese troops recapture the ancient capital of Hue from communist forces.

1981 – Socialite Jean Harris is convicted of murdering ex-lover Dr. Herman Tarnower, author of the bestselling “The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet,” concluding a sensational trial that ignited a national debate about whether Harris was a woman scorned or a victim of abuse.

1988 – The U.S. Supreme Court sides with Larry Flynt’s Hustler magazine by overturning a lower court decision to award the Reverend Jerry Falwell $200,000 for defamation.

1991 – After the six-week-long bombing campaign against Iraq and its armed forces known as Operation Desert Storm, U.S.-led coalition forces launch a massive ground offensive against Kuwait and Iraq.

Musical Milestones
Musical Milestones

1958 – The Silhouettes are on top of the Billboard pop chart with “Get a Job.” Thanks to the band’s performances on “American Bandstand” and “The Dick Clark Show,” the single goes on to sell over a million copies.

1968 – French orchestra leader Paul Mauriat is in the middle of a five-week run atop the Billboard singles chart with his instrumental, “Love is Blue.” It is the only song by a French artist to ever top Hot 100.

1973 – Roberta Flack begins a five-week reign over the singles chart with “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” The song garners Flack the 1973 Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female, with co-writers Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel earning the Song of the Year Grammy.

1975 – Led Zeppelin’s sixth studio album, “Physical Graffiti,” is released in the U.S. and immediately sees one million copies ship — a whopping order for Atlantic Records. The double album, which features the iconic photo of a New York City tenement on the cover, contains some of the band’s most memorable tracks, including “Kashmir,” “Ten Years Gone” and “In My Time of Dying.”

1982 – Winners at the 24th Annual Grammy Awards include John Lennon and Yoko Ono for Album of the Year (“Double Fantasy”), songwriters Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon for Song of the Year (“Bette Davis Eyes” performed by Kim Carnes), Sheena Easton for Best New Artist and Quincy Jones for Producer of the Year.

1990 – Singer-songwriter and pianist Johnnie Ray dies of liver failure at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Ray is credited with 20 Top 40 singles between 1952 and 1960, including “Just Walking in the Rain.”

1990 – Paula Abdul and The Wild Pair enjoy their third and final week as Billboard chart-toppers with “Opposites Attract.”

1996 – “One Sweet Day” by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men is the No. 1 single.

2001 – “Stutter,” by Joe featuring Mystikal, kicks off four weeks on top of the pop chart.

2007 – Nelly Furtado lands on top of the Billboard Hot 100 for a week with “Say It Right.”

On this Day July 20

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History Highlights
History Highlights

1944 – A plot to murder German dictator Adolf Hitler fails as a bomb planted in a briefcase goes off, but leaves him only slightly wounded. Known as Operation Valkyrie, the assassination attempt was masterminded by senior-level German military officials who wanted to remove Hitler in order to establish a new government. Hitler’s would-be assassins are executed after being discovered.

1969 – More than a billion people around the world are glued to TV sets and radios as Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to step onto the surface of the moon. He famously marks the landmark event by saying, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

1973 – Actor and martial arts icon Bruce Lee dies unexpectedly at the age of 32, just before the release of his film, “Enter the Dragon.” The official cause of death is a brain edema, possibly triggered by a reaction to a prescription painkiller that Lee was reportedly taking for a back injury.

1976 – On the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, Viking 1, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, becomes the first spacecraft to successfully land on the surface of Mars. 

1976 – In Major League Baseball, “Hammerin'” Hank Aaron hits his 755th and final home run during the Milwaukee Brewers’ game against the California Angels. 

1977 – A flash flood washes over Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing 84 people and causing millions of dollars in damage. The disaster marks the third time that floods, caused by dam failures, devastate the same community. The Great Flood of 1889 killed more than 2,000 people in Johnstown. A second flood in 1936 left two dozen people dead.

2012 – Twelve people are killed and 70 others are injured when a gunman opens fire inside a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.  The theater was packed with Batman fans that were there for a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.” The tragedy becomes the deadliest mass shooting in Colorado since the Columbine shooting in 1999 in which 12 high school students and a teacher were gunned down.

Musical Milestones
Musical Milestones

1963 – Beach music is the favorite on this day, as Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” hits No. 1 on the singles chart. 

1968 – Trumpeter Hugh Masekela begins a two-week run on top of the singles chart with the jazz instrumental “Grazing in the Grass.” In 2018, the song is inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

1968 – Heavy metal strikes the album chart for the first time in the form of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” which was originally supposed to be titled “In The Garden of Eden.” The 17-minute title track takes up all of Side Two and was edited down to 2:53 for release as a single.

1974 – Early disco hit “Rock Your Baby,” by George McCrae, begins its second and final week as a No. 1 single.

1985 – Duran Duran begin their second and final week on top of the Billboard Hot 100 with “A View to a Kill,” from the James Bond movie of the same name.

1986 – The movie “Sid & Nancy,” based on the life of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, premieres in London, starring Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb.

1991 – One-hit-wonder EMF kick off a week at No. 1 on the pop chart with “Unbelievable.”

1996 – “How Do U Want It,” by 2Pac featuring K-Ci & JoJo, grabs the top spot on the Billboard single chart. The track remains at No. 1 for a week.

2002 – “Hot in Herre,” by Nelly, is in the midst of a seven-week run at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The track garners Nelly a 2003 Grammy for Best Male Rap Solo Performance, a brand new category at the time.

On this Day July 18

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History Highlights
History Highlights

1936 – The Oscar Mayer company rolls out the first Wienermobile to market its hot dogs. The small, metal wiener-shaped shell on wheels — the brainchild of Oscar’s nephew, Carl Mayer — stretched 13 feet long and cruised the streets of Chicago with Carl behind the wheel. Over the years, modern, more spacious versions of the original Wienermobile began to criss-cross the U.S., and still do today.

1940 – Franklin D. Roosevelt, who first took office in 1933 as America’s 32nd president, is nominated at the Democratic National Convention for an unprecedented third term. Roosevelt is eventually elected to a record four terms in office, the only U.S. president to serve more than two terms.

1947 – General Dwight D. Eisenhower appoints Florence Blanchfield to be a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, making her the first woman in American history to hold permanent military rank.

1969 – Mary Jo Kopechne, the 28-year-old passenger in a car driven by Massachusetts Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy, is killed when the vehicle plunges off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard. The incident becomes a national scandal, referred to as “Chappaquiddick,” and is believed to have influenced Kennedy’s decision not to campaign for president in 1972 and 1976.

1976 – Fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci becomes the first person in Olympic Games history to score a perfect 10 during the Summer Olympics in Montreal. 

1984 – James Oliver Huberty opens fire in a crowded McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, California, killing 21 people and wounding 19 others with several automatic weapons.

1986 – New close-up videotaped footage of the sunken ocean liner Titanic is released to the public. It shows one of the ship’s majestic grand staircases and a coral-covered chandelier swinging slowly in the ocean current.

On this Day July 4

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Musical Milestones
Musical Milestones

1953 – Eddie Fisher begins a seven-week domination of the singles chart with “I’m Walking Behind You.”

1964 – “I Get Around,” by the Beach Boys, is No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It holds the top spot for two weeks.

1969 – Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Winter, Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR), Canned Heat, Joe Cocker, Blood Sweat & Tears, Chuck Berry and other popular acts perform at the Atlanta Pop Festival in Byron, Georgia.

1970 – A radio institution is born on this day. It’s “American Top 40” (“AT40”) with host Casey Kasem, a nationally syndicated program that counts down the 40 hottest singles in the U.S. according to Billboard magazine. The first countdown ends with the Jackson 5’s “The Love You Save,” then in its second and final week at No. 1. 

1981 – Kim Carnes tops the Billboard Hot 100 for a seventh week with “Bette Davis Eyes.”

1987 – “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” by Whitney Houston, begins its second and final week as a Billboard chart-topper.

1992 – “Baby Got Back” puts Sir Mix-a-Lot on top of the pop chart for five weeks. The track becomes the second best-selling song of 1992, behind Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”

2003 – Grammy-winning soul singer-songwriter Barry White (“Can’t Get Enough of Your Love,” “You’re the First, The Last, My Everything”) — whose smooth, deep vocals dominated the pop chart throughout the 70s —  dies of kidney failure at the age of 58.

On this Day June 13

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On this Day May 16

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History Highlights
History Highlights

1929 – A far cry from the pageantry of today’s Oscar ceremonies, about 270 guests attend a dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel where the first Academy Awards are handed out.

1960 – Two weeks after the Soviet downing of an American U-2 spy plane, Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev lashes out at the U.S. and President Dwight D. Eisenhower at a Paris summit between the two heads of state. Khrushchev’s outburst angered Eisenhower and doomed any chances for successful talks or negotiations.

1965 – The Franco-American food company revolutionizes the way American kids eat when it introduces SpaghettiOs — canned pasta rings in tomato and cheese sauce. “The neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon…Uh-Oh! SpaghettiOs.”

1977 – A commuter helicopter accident on the roof of the Pan Am Building (now MetLife Building) in Manhattan leaves five people dead, eight others injured. Investigators blame the crash on “metal fatigue,” which caused the landing gear to fail. The helipad is never used again.

1988 – Surgeon General C. Everett Koop issues a report stating that the addictive properties of nicotine are similar to those of heroin and cocaine.

1996 – The final episode of “Murder, She Wrote,” starring Angela Lansbury as mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher, airs on CBS, ending a successful 12-season run.

2014 – Broadcast journalist and TV personality Barbara Walters retires from ABC News and as co-host of the daytime program “The View.” The 84-year-old Walters blazed a trail for women in television news during a distinguished career spanning more than 50 years.