This Week In American History

January 8 1978 Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the history of California, took his place on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A native of Long...

The first New Year’s celebration dates back 4,000 years. Julius Caesar, the emperor of Rome, was the first to declare January 1st a national holiday. He named the month after...

January 1   1863 A farmer named Daniel Freeman submitted the first claim under the new Homestead Act for a property near Beatrice, Nebraska. Signed into law in 1862 by...

December 25 1776 During the American Revolution, Patriot General George Washington crossed the icy Delaware River with 5,400 troops, hoping to surprise a Hessian force celebrating Christmas at their winter...

Although most Christians celebrate December 25 as the birthday of Jesus Christ, few in the first two Christian centuries claimed any knowledge of the exact day or year in which...

December 18 1620 The British ship Mayflower docked at modern-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, and its passengers prepared to begin their new settlement, Plymouth Colony. Aided by the Wampanoag, especially the English-speaking...

December 11    1941 Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States. While the bombing of Pearl Harbor surprised even Germany, Hitler had made an oral agreement with his Axis...

At 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time, a Japanese dive bomber bearing the red symbol of the Rising Sun of Japan on its wings appeared out of the clouds above the island...

December 4 1867 U.S. Department of Agriculture official Oliver Kelley gathered a group of farmers who became the founders of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as...

November 27 1910 New York City's Pennsylvania Station opened as the world's largest railway terminal. The original Penn Station occupied two city blocks and was built by The Pennsylvania Railroad....

The tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday dates to the early history of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, when post-harvest holidays were celebrated on the weekday regularly set aside...

November 20    1923 The U.S. Patent Office granted Patent No. 1,475,074 to 46-year-old inventor and newspaperman Garrett Morgan for his three-position traffic signal. Though Morgan’s was not the first traffic...