This Week In American History

October 4 1933 Men's magazine Esquire was first published. It began production as an oversized magazine for men that featured a slick, sophisticated style and drawings of scantily clad young...

September 27 1962 Rachel Carson’s watershed work Silent Spring is published. Originally serialized in The New Yorker magazine, the book shed light on the damage that man-made pesticides inflict on...

September 20 1973 In a highly publicized "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match, top women's player Billie Jean King, 29, beat Bobby Riggs, 55, a former #1 ranked men's player....

September 13     1963 Texas-born entrepreneur Mary Kay Ash launched a cosmetic company in Dallas with her $5,000 life savings and the help of her 20-year-old son Richard Rogers....

August 30 1963 Hotline communication link between the Pentagon and the Kremlin in Moscow was installed. Often known as the "red telephone," no phones were ever used, relying instead on...

August 23 1966 Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photo of Earth as seen from lunar orbit. While a remarkable image at the time, the full resolution of the image...

August 16 1904 New York City and the Vanderbilts began building Grand Central Station. The building was the largest construction project in New York’s history up to that time. It’s...

August 9 1854 Henry David Thoreau's classic "Walden", or, "A Life in the Woods", was released. The American transcendentalist writer’s work is a first-person account of his experimental time of simple...

August 2     In a hotel in San Francisco, President Warren G. Harding died of a stroke at the age of 58. Harding was returning from a presidential tour of Alaska and the...

July 26    1775 The U.S. postal system was establish by the Scond Continental Congress, with Benjamin Franklin as its first postmaster general. Today, the US has over 40,000 post offices...

July 19 1848 At the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, a woman's right convention - the first ever held in the United States - convened with almost 200...

July 12     1862 The Medal of Honor was created when President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a measure calling for the awarding of a U.S. Army Medal of...