1811: The Battle of Tippecanoe is fought near present-day Battle Ground, Indiana.
1837: In Alton, Illinois, abolitionist printer Elijah P. Lovejoy is shot dead by a mob while attempting to protect his printing shop from being destroyed a third time.
1874: A cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly, is considered the first important use of an elephant as a symbol for the United States Republican Party. The New York Times has a great explanation of it.
1907: Jesús García saves the entire town of Nacozari de Garcia, Sonora by driving a burning train full of dynamite six kilometers away before it can explode.1913: Albert Camus is born.
1917: In Petrograd, Russia, Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky lead revolutionaries in overthrowing the Provisional Government
1918: The 1918 influenza epidemic spreads to Western Samoa, killing 7,542 (about 20% of the population) by the end of the year. After the Samoan Islands were divided up by Germany and the US in 1899, Germany got the larger Western Samoa and the US got the smaller - but more useful - American Samoa. Because of World War I, Germany had been cut off from it's colonial possessions and Western Samoa had been bloodlessly taken by New Zealand in 1914. When the influenza epidemic was getting underway in 1918, New Zealand's attention was elsewhere and Western Samoa was especially well hit. Compare this to neighboring American Samoa where the US military government was quick to insitute quarantine and hygiene rules and they suffered much, much less. A good (if stat laden) book on this is America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby. Holy crap, it's 64 dollars! It must have gone out of print. Well, if you want to read it, just ask me and I'll loan it to you.
1927: Hiroshi Yamauchi is born. He is the business man who turned Nintendo from a playing card company to a video game powerhouse.
1933: Fiorello H. La Guardia is elected the 99th mayor of New York City.
1940: In Tacoma, Washington, the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge ("Galloping Gertie") collapses in a windstorm, a mere four months after the bridge's completion. The only fatality ws a dog named Tubby who was stuck in the car. Poor dog! As I understand it, the solid girder construction turned the bridge into a giant wing (as opposed to a lattice girder bridge, which would let the wind through). When the wind got high enough, it was like making a piece of paper flutter by blowing on it. Wikipedia has a much more complicated explanation of it with terms like "force resonance."1942: Johnny Rivers is born. He did "Seventh Son" and "Poor Side of Town" and "Summer Rain" but he is most famous for "Secret Agent Man" That's a great guitar lick.
1949: Judy Tenuta, esoteric comedienne, is born. She was briefly married to esoteric comedian Emo Phillips. I can't (and won't) imagine what their bedroom life was like.
1962: Richard Nixon, after failing in his bid for governor of California, says to reporters, "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore."
1967: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
1973: Congress overrides President Richard M. Nixon's veto of the War Powers Resolution, which limits presidential power to wage war without congressional approval.
1994: WXYC, the student radio station of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides the world's first internet radio broadcast.
Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.
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