This Day In History

The Federal Industrial Institution for Women, the first women’s federal prison, opens in Alderson, West Virginia. All women serving federal sentences of more than a year were to be brought here. Run by Dr. Mary B. […]

On April 29, 1986, in a game against the Seattle Mariners at Fenway Park, Roger Clemens of the Boston Red Sox becomes the first pitcher in Major League Baseball to strike out 20 batters in […]

On this day in 2011, Phillip Garrido, 60, and his wife Nancy, 55, plead guilty to the 1991 kidnapping of 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard. The Garridos held Dugard captive at their Northern California property for 18 years, during […]

On April 27, 1963, Margaret Annemarie Battavio’s very first single, “I Will Follow Him,” reached #1 on the U.S. pop charts. With her 15th birthday only six weeks behind her, and three more years of […]

The crowd outside 254 West 54th Street in New York City on this day in 1927 would have been waiting for the curtain of a Puccini opera. On this day in 1957 or ’67, they would have […]

The Soviet Union releases a letter that Russian leader Yuri Andropov wrote to Samantha Smith, an American fifth-grader. This rather unusual piece of Soviet propaganda was in direct response to President Ronald Reagan’s vigorous attacks on what […]

President John Adams approves legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress,” thus establishing the Library of Congress. The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were […]

Beating a rival publisher by a mere 20 minutes, William Byers distributes the first newspaper ever published in the frontier boomtown of Denver, Colorado. Byers had arrived in Denver the previous month. He had previously worked […]

George “Baby Face” Nelson kills Special AgentW. Carter Baum during an FBIraid in northern Wisconsin. Nelson was holed up with notorious bank robber John Dillinger’s gang at the Little Bohemia resort but didn’t follow the planned escape […]

Rosie Ruiz, age 26, finishes first in the women’s division of the Boston Marathon with a time of 2:31:56 on April 21, 1980. She was rewarded with a medal, a laurel wreath and a silver […]