This Week In American History

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...

March 1 1932 In a crime that captured the attention of the entire nation, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the 20-month-old son of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, was kidnapped from the family’s...

February 22 1819 After years of negotiations, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams achieved a diplomatic coup when he and the Spanish minister Do Luis de Onis signed the Florida...

February 15 1898 A massive explosion sank the USS Maine in Cuba’s Havana harbor, killing 260 of the fewer than 400 American crew members aboard. One of the first American...