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1228: St Francis of Assisi was canonized.
1377: Richard II was officially crowned King of England. Luckily for Shakespeare, if not for the country.
1790: The Congress of a very young country declares that its new nation's capital shall be located on a site between Maryland and Virginia, rather humid and swampy, and named "The District of Columbia."
1918: The last ruling dynasty of Russia, the Romanovs, are executed as a family in a cellar in Yekaterinburg. Conspiracy theories, including those which inspired several Hollywood movies on the stories of "survivors," abound over the next eighty years, but in 1991 most of them are put to rest with the recovery, and DNA testing, of the remains found in a forest near the site. The remains of the youngest daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, have still not been located, and so her remains (while being ruled out as those of fraudulent claimants to the throne over the years) have never been found.
1941: New York Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio (also, for a time, Marilyn Monroe's famous husband) finishes out his 56-game hitting streak, which stands as a record to this day.
1945: The world's first atomic bomb explodes, as part of a test, near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Also, 1945: Churchill, Stalin, and Truman meet at Potsdam.
1951: JD Salinger's novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is first published.
1969: Apollo 11 blasts off from The Kennedy Space Center, on its historic mission to land the first men on the moon.
1979: Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq.
1998: The United Nations Criminal Court is established, and began to sit four years later.
1999: John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife Carolyn, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette are killed in a plane crash off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Kennedy was piloting the plane. Many feel that the circumstances of the event have never been fully explained.
2009: American journalist Walter Cronkite died at the age of 92.
There's much, much, more. Have at it.
Discussion (24)
CONTRIBUTOR
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Well. In 1955 I was born. Between Trinity and Apollo 11.
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1054: The Great Schism between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
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My son was born in 1973.
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Happy birthday.
CHARTER MEMBER
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The young Kennedy was not qualified, nor proficient enough to be flying in essential a hazy, no visible horizons, conditions. His Piper was equipped with the old steam gauges IFR instrumentation, which is a challenge even when you have normal expected minimums for visibility, while trying to come down to the approach for Martha’s Vineyard airport, at dusk, is something even really seasoned pilots would not attempt.
Even in today glass panel w/ wysiwyg artificial horizon instruments driven by a GPS data base would be a challenge. Doing it on a bunch of radio driven needles (and make sure you have dialed in the correct frequencies). Yeah and too much “get there itis” pressure from his wife was just the last link in the chain of bad decisions.
And Yes, I was a newly minted IFR pilot when this occurred and you bet I throughly read the NTSB report of what went wrong.
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