This Week In American History

May 24 1844 American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse inaugurated the world’s first commercial telegraph line when he dispatched a telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol to Alfred Vail at a...

May 17   1943 The crew of the Memphis Belle, one of a group of American bombers based in Britain, became one of the first B-17 crews to complete 25...

May 10 1869 The presidents of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met in Promontory, Utah, and drive a ceremonial last spike into a rail line that connects their...

May 3 1936 Batting ahead of Lou Gehrig in the lineup, Joe DiMaggio made his major league debut with The Yankees. DiMaggio was a three-time Most Valuable Player Award winner and an...

April 26   1954 The Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, began at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada...

April 19   1775 The American Revolution began when 700 British troops, on a mission to capture Patriot leaders and seize a Patriot arsenal, marched into Lexington to find 77...

April 12 1861 The bloodiest four years in American history began when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor....

April 5 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), an innovative federally funded organization that put tens of thousands of Americans to work during the Great...

March 29     1929 President Herbert Hoover had a phone installed at his desk in the Oval Office of the White House. It took a while to get the...

March 22 1765 The British government passed the Stamp Act in an effort to raise funds to pay off debts and defend the vast new American territories won from the...

March 15 1820 As part of the Missouri Compromise between the North and the South, Maine was admitted into the Union as the 23rd state. Administered as a province of...

March 8 1982 Speaking to a convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Florida, President Reagan publicly referred to the Soviet Union as an evil empire for the second...