American Lives

Americans in History: January 16

1754: George Washington arrived in Williamsburg, VA, to report to Lt Gov Robert Dinwiddie on his trip to Fort Le Boeuf in the Ohio Valley.

1776: Boston loyalist Peter Oliver reported that the old North Church had been torn down for firewood after most of Rev John Lathrop's patriot congregation fled the city.

1792: In Florida, William Augustus Bowles and a band of Creeks captured the Panton, Leslie & Company trading post at St Marks.

1804: Mississippi's attorney general claimed that several suspects jailed for capital offenses in Choctaw country belonged to a band of river pirates led by Samuel Mason.

1854: Settlers from Yreka, CA, confronted Shasta Indians over stolen cattle with fatal results, helping to rekindle the Rogue River War.

1861: John Coffee Williamson wrote in his diary that he had visited a phrenologist in Cleveland, TN, where he "acted the fool and paid him five dollars."

1862: At Cedar Key, FL, Union forces aboard the USS Hatteras destroyed a Confederate battery and seven loaded vessels ready to run the blockade, as well as any structure of military value on the island.

1865: Gen William Sherman issued Field Order No. 15, giving former slaves "now made free by the acts of war" allotments of abandoned coastal land from Charleston to the St Johns River in Florida.

1865: After the Battle of Fort Fisher, a magazine explosion killed at least 200 men, with many more injured.

1887: Cliff House in San Francisco was damaged when the schooner Parallel exploded beneath the cliff.

1891: Two Strike's Brule Lakota band surrendered for the second time to Gen Nelson Miles.

1920: Prohibition went into effect, forbidding the sale or manufacture of alcoholic beverages in the US.

1935: Ma Barker and one of her sons were killed in a shootout with the FBI at Ocklawaha, FL.

1941: The Secretary of War approved the establishment of a training program for black pilots at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

1942: A Dauntless dive bomber landing on the USS Enterprise snapped an arresting cable, killing ACMM George Lawhon; another plane from the carrier ran out of gas and force-landed at sea, where the crew survived for 34 days on a rubber raft.

1943: A severe fuel shortage grounded US aircraft of the China Air Task Force for a month.

1945: B-24 bombers were dispatched with fighter escort to Ruhland and Dresden; two bombers and a P-51 were lost.

1965: A USAF KC-135 tanker crashed into a residential area of Wichita, KS, killing the crew and 23 people on the ground.

1966: F-105 fighter pilot Capt Don Wood was shot down during a photo recon mission over Laos, and remains unaccounted for.

1969: Pfc Garfield Langhorn earned the Medal of Honor when he threw himself on an enemy grenade to protect wounded troops near Plei Djereng in Pleiku Province.

Egghead 10:19 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 15

1677: William Drummond, the first governor of Albermarle, was hanged by Sir William Berkeley for his part in Bacon's Rebellion.

1756: Benjamin Franklin and a militia detachment arrived at Gnadenhuetten, PA, following a deadly attack by the Munsee, while a group of Moravian settlers leaving the safety of Bethlehem to return to their farms ran into a Delaware war party.

1771: The Johnston Riot Act, aka the Bloody Act, was ratified by the North Carolina Assembly in response to the Regulators' activities.

1777: New Connecticut declared its independence from Britain and established a republic that lasted until it joined the Union as the state of Vermont.

1780: After crossing the ice in New York Harbor, Lord Stirling and his men were forced to abandon their planned assault on British and Hessian forces garrisoned on Staten Island.

1808: The 1805 Treaty of Mount Dexter, ceding almost five million acres of Choctaw land on the Florida border to the US, was finally brought to the Senate by President Jefferson.

1811: Two slaves involved in a revolt were executed in front of the plantation of Jean Destrehan in St Charles Parish, LA.

1832: About 1,000 Choctaws, during their removal to Indian Territory, arrived at Little Rock packed aboard the steamboat Reindeer.

1865: Union forces took Fort Fisher; Ensign Robley Evans wrote: "About 500 yards from the fort, the head of the column suddenly stopped, and, as if by magic, the whole mass of men went down like a row of falling bricks."

1877: Ponca chief Standing Bear refused to move to the reservation assigned to his tribe in Indian Territory.

1891: Kicking Bear was the last Lakota leader to surrender to the US Army, ending the Ghost War.

1919: The Molasses Disaster killed 21 people in Boston when a storage tank ruptured, spilling more than two million gallons of molasses onto city streets.

1942: Surrounded by Japanese forces on the Bataan peninsula, Gen Douglas MacArthur told his men, "Help is on the way from the United States. Thousands of troops and hundreds of planes are being despatched."

1943: A C-54 Skymaster crashed in the jungle near Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana; Maj Eric Knight, author of "Lassie Come Home," was among those killed.

1944: The Tule Lake Japanese American internment camp was returned to civilian control after two months under martial law.

1945: While flying escort for a B-17 bomber raid, Lt William Patton's P-51 fighter crashed at Neupre, Belgium.

1945: Cmdr George Klinsmann survived a force-landing at sea during an attack on the Pescadore Islands off Taiwan, but drowned before he could be rescued.

1961: Texas Tower No. 4, a USAF early warning station, collapsed into the sea during a winter storm off Portland, ME; all 28 men aboard were lost.

1968: SP5 Dwight Johnson earned the Medal of Honor near Dak To while en route to assist an armored column under heavy fire in Kontum Province.

1995: Prof Susan Ginsberg Hadden was killed and her husband seriously wounded in Cambodia when Khmer Rouge rebels attacked their sightseeing convoy.

Egghead 10:33 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 14

1697: The Massachusetts legislature declared a day of fasting and repentence following the witchcraft trials; in churches, men who once sat in judgment of the accused or testified against them examined their consciences.

1702: In Charles County, MD, James Mankin, age 7, was bound by his mother to John and Susanna Semmes until he was 21 years old.

1704: An expedition of Spanish troops and Apalachee Indians were dispatched to recapture the Ayubale mission from South Carolina.

1794: At Edom, VA, Dr Jesse Bennett performed the first successful Caesarean section recorded in America, on his wife Elizabeth.

1817: A report on Swedenborgian missionary John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, was published in England: "This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches...of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries."

1847: Mormon leader Brigham Young announced a revelation with instructions for Mormon migration to the West.

1847: Several leaders of a conspiracy against the US occupation of New Mexico were arrested.

1863: US Army and Navy forces attacked the Confederate gunboat JA Cotton at Bayou Teche.

1863: Louisiana sugar planters complained to Union Gen Nathaniel Banks about the effects of war and occupation on their operations.

1865: The Confederate blockade runner Lelia foundered off the English coast, with numerous lives lost.

1894: The Nashville American noted that, since the Panic of '93, there had been five bank failures and 52 business collapses in the city.

1941: A Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a march on Washington, DC, to demand equal access to defense industry jobs.

1942: The Panamanian tanker Norness was torpedoed and sunk by a German sub outside New York Harbor.

1944: USMC radio gunner Paul McCleaf's plane crashed in the New Britain area; held prisoner at Rabaul, he was later killed in an attack by US bombers.

1944: Emanuel Parker was the first black worker hired at Fisher Body.

1945: While escorting a B-24 bomber mission, P-51 fighter pilot Lt George Behling was shot down and captured in Germany.

1945: Flying escort for a bomber raid on Truk, fighter pilot Bill Eustis collided with an enemy fighter and wound up in a Yokohama POW camp.

1966: A seven-county raid centered in Swainsboro, GA, busted 63 stills.

1969: A Zuni rocket ignited aboard the USS Enterprise; fires and explosions killed 28 and injured 343 others.

1969: Lt John Warren earned the Medal of Honor when his company came under enemy fire while moving through a rubber plantation in Tay Ninh Province.

Egghead 10:22 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 13

1639: Richard Wait was excommunicated from Boston's First Church.

1663: Samuel Kitchel and William Leete bought land near Guilford from Uncas, the Mohegan sachem.

1684: Juan Domínguez de Mendoza's expedition reached the Pecos River at Horsehead Crossing.

1756: A council began at Carlisle between Pennsylvania authorities and local tribes; the talks led to the declaration of war against the Delaware and Shawnee.

1775: An ad in the North Carolina Gazette announced that the schooner Hope had arrived at New Bern with "a Parcel of likely healthy slaves" from Africa, including adults and children.

1837: The Articles of Agreement were entered into by "settlers upon the Wallamette River"; due to the Hudson's Bay Company's refusal to sell them any cattle, the Willamette Cattle Company sailed to California where they bought Spanish herds to drive overland to Oregon.

1874: In the Tompkins Square Massacre, mounted police charged into a meeting of unemployed workers lobbying for public works projects, beating men, women and children.

1902: The Commissioner of Indian Affairs wrote to the superintendent of a California Indian school, ordering that Indian dress and traditions among the students be banned, and that the long hair of Indian boys be cut off, in order to civilize them.

1903: The SS Gaelic docked in Honolulu with 102 Korean workers aboard, beginning the first wave of Korean immigration to Hawaii and the mainland.

1928: Nellie Zabel Willhite soloed and became South Dakota's first licensed woman pilot, in spite of being almost completely deaf.

1944: US Treasury officials wrote a "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews" for presentation to Secretary Henry Morgenthau.

1945: In England, six P-51 Mustangs went down due to heavy overcast while escorting heavy bomber missions bound for Germany; all six pilots were lost.

1945: Chief Storekeeper HG Williamson reported on board the USS Blue Ridge; captured by the Japanese in January 1942 at Cavite, he escaped two months later and remained in hiding near San Fabian for nearly three years.

1964: After its 48-foot-tall tail section sheared off in heavy turbulence, B-52D Stratofortress, flying a Chrome Dome mission with two nuclear bombs on board, crashed near Cumberland, MD; only two of the five-man crew survived.

Egghead 10:08 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 12

1642: Samuel Gorton and ten others bought a tract of land called Shawomet from Narragansett sachem Miantonomi.

1687: Sir Edmund Andros dissolved the Rhode Island charter in his effort to make the colony part of the Dominion of New England.

1776: In Georgia, a British man o' war appeared at Tybee Island with troops from Boston.

1796: Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to George Wythe, that he had found the Charles City Manuscript in Lorton's Tavern in Virginia, being used as "waste paper."

1889: The leaders of the New Mexico legislature, Francisco Cháves and Albert Fountain, were ordered to leave Santa Fe or die.

1893: Jack London, on his 17th birthday, sailed on the seal-hunting ship Sophie Sutherland, later using the experience in writing his novel The Sea Wolf.

1912: The Bread & Roses Strike, of 32,000 women and children textile workers, began at Lawrence, MA.

1940: The US Antarctic Service motorship North Star reached the Bay of Whales in Antarctica and unloaded a snow cruiser and other cargo.

1942: While leading a counterattack in the Battle of Abucay on the Bataan peninsula, Lt Alexander Nininger earned the first Congressional Medal of Honor awarded in WWII.

1942: Over 1,000 American POWs were loaded into the cargo hold of the Nitta Maru for transport from Wake Island.

1944: In Italy, US Army forces captured Cervaro and Mount Capraro, advancing toward Cassino.

1945: Task Force 38 attacked Japanese shipping, airfields and other targets at Saigon in French Indochina; 16 US aircraft were lost, plus a B-24 shot down by friendly fire.

1948: After she was denied entry to the University of Oklahoma's law school due to her race, the Supreme Court ordered the state to provide Ada Lois Sipuel with the same education offered to white students.

1953: A USAF B-29 was shot down over the Yalu River area; the surviving crew members were taken prisoner by the Chinese.

1968: Pfc William Port earned the Medal of Honor when his platoon came under fire in the Que Son Valley; three soldiers were killed and Port was taken prisoner, dying of his wounds and starvation within a year.

Egghead 10:34 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 11

1639: Charles I granted the royal colony of Virginia the right to seat a General Assembly once a year, allowing partial self-rule.

1698: French missionaries visited a Tunica village on the Mississippi River.

1758: Georgia's General Assembly passed a law making the Church of England the official church of the colony; it was designed not to interfere with other classes of worshippers, but the law excluding Catholic settlers was not repealed.

1820: Fire broke out in Savannah, exploding an illegal gunpowder cache and destroying much of the city.

1839: John Benge arrived in Indian Territory with over 1,000 Cherokees.

1863: The USS Hatteras was sunk by the CSS Alabama off Galveston.

1868: William Cody killed 19 buffalo near Leavenworth, KS, selling the meat at 7 cents a pound to feed railroad workers.

1887: Hangman George Maledon dispatched four men in a multiple hanging at Fort Smith.

1918: The US Army announced it was recruiting 2,000 carrier pigeons as messengers on the battlefield as part of a new "wireless system."

1937: The Battle of the Running Bulls was a violent confrontation between police and striking auto workers at a plant in Flint, MI.

1942: In Operation Paukenschlag, the first group of five German subs were stationed off the eastern US coast, hunting and sinking Allied ships.

1944: 177 B-17 bombers were dispatched to attack Oschersleben and met heavy enemy fire; 34 B-17s were lost and 85 damaged, with nine airmen killed, 11 wounded and 349 missing; P-51 fighter pilot Maj James Howard earned the Medal of Honor that day.

1945: US Navy underwater demolition crews contended with suicide swimmers at Luzon; a kamikaze hit the USS Belknap, killing 38 men.

1961: Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were suspended "for their own protection" from the University of Georgia due to violent protests on campus.

1969: Capt Harold Fritz earned the Medal of Honor when his armored column was ambushed on Highway 13 in Binh Long Province.

Egghead 10:19 AM - [Link]
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