Tag: this day in history

31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in January 2024

31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in January 2024

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Here are 31 newsworthy and notable historical anniversaries in January 2024 (listed six months in advance so you have time to write about them)

Historical anniversaries are great for ‘On This Day in History’ features, articles, biographies and other anniversary tie-ins. They’re popular with newspaper and magazine readers and radio stations, and editors, producers and presenters love them. They’re easy to research too. You can also turn them into movies, documentaries, novels, use them to plan events and exhibitions, and much more. (Find out more at the end of this article.)

We’ve randomly picked one anniversary for each day of the month from The Date-A-Base Book 2024, which lists more than 3,000 anniversaries.

1 Jan 1874 – 150 years ago
The Bronx was annexed by New York City.

2 Jan 1974 – 50 years ago
The maximum national speed limit in the USA was reduced to 55 MPH to conserve fuel during the OPEC oil embargo. The oil embargo was lifted in March 1974, but the speed limit remained in force and was made permanent in January 1975. It was repealed in 1995.

3 Jan 1624 – 400 years ago
Birth of William Tucker, the first African-American born in America.

4 Jan 1944 to 30 Apr 1945 – 80 years ago
World War II: Operation Carpetbagger. The U.S. Army Air Forces dropped weapons and supplies to resistance fighters in France, Italy and the Low Countries.

5 Jan 1949 – 75 years ago
U.S. President Harry S. Truman unveiled his Fair Deal programme in his State of the Union address.

6 Jan 1949 – 75 years ago
Genes were photographed for the first time, by Daniel C. Pease and Richard F. Baker at the University of Southern California, USA.

7 Jan 1934 – 90 years ago
The first Flash Gordon comic strip was published. It was created by Alex Raymond to compete with the Buck Rogers comic strip.

8 Jan 1324 – 700 years ago
Death of Marco Polo, Venetian/Italian merchant, explorer and writer. Best known for his book The Travels of Marco Polo, which details his travels along the Silk Road in Asia.

9 Jan 1949 – 75 years ago
Death of Tommy Handley, British radio comedian. Best known for It’s That Man Again (ITMA).

10 Jan 1924 – 100 years ago
Columbia Pictures, the American film studio and production company, was established. The company was originally founded as the Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales Corporation in 1918.

11 Jan 1964 – 60 years ago
The U.S. Surgeon General, Luther L. Terry, published a report which concluded that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer and chronic bronchitis. This was the first official U.S. government report on the health issues of smoking. Warnings were placed on packaging from January 1965. (An earlier report, published in the UK in March 1962, had reached the same conclusion.)

12 Jan 1959 – 65 years ago
The Motown record label was founded in Detroit, Michigan, USA by Berry Gordy. (It was initially known as Tamla Records.)

13 Jan 1964 – 60 years ago
Bob Dylan’s album The Times They Are A-Changin’ was released.

14 Jan 1994 – 30 years ago
U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed the Kremlin Accords. They agreed to stop pre-targeting nuclear missiles at any nation, and to dismantle Russia’s nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

15 Jan 1924 – 100 years ago
The BBC broadcast the first play written specifically for radio: A Comedy of Danger by Richard Hughes.

16 Jan 1874 – 150 years ago
Birth of Robert W. Service, (‘the Bard of the Yukon’), British-born Canadian poet, writer and traveller. Best known for his poems about the Klondike Gold Rush.

17 Jan 1874 – 150 years ago
Death of Chang and Eng Bunker, Thai-American conjoined twins. The original Siamese twins.

18 Jan 1974 – 50 years ago
The first regular episode of the science fiction-action television series The Six Million Dollar Man was broadcast on ABC in the USA. It ran for five seasons until March 1978.

19 Jan 1949 – 75 years ago
Birth of Robert Palmer, British rock singer. His songs included Addicted to Love, Simply Irresistible and Bad Case of Loving You. (Died 2003.)

20 Jan 1964 – 60 years ago
The first Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue was published.

21 Jan 1924 – 100 years ago
Death of Vladimir Lenin, Russian communist leader. Architect and first head of the Soviet Union.

22 Jan 1984 – 40 years ago
The first Apple Macintosh computer went on sale.

23 Jan 1849 – 175 years ago
Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the USA to receive a medical degree.

24 Jan 1949 – 75 years ago
Birth of John Belushi, American comedian and actor (Saturday Night Live, The Blues Brothers). (Died 1982.)

25 Jan to 5 Feb 1924 – 100 years ago
The first Winter Olympics were held in Chamonix, France.

26 Jan 1934 – 90 years ago
The Apollo Theatre in Harlem, New York City, USA re-opened and began accepting black performers for the first time. It launched the careers of many popular singers and entertainers.

27 Jan 1984 – 40 years ago
American pop singer Michael Jackson suffered serious burns to his scalp when his hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial.

28 Jan 1999 – 25 years ago
Yahoo! acquired the web hosting service GeoCities. The acquisition was hugely unpopular with users, and many of them left. The U.S. service shut down in 2009.

29 Jan 1944 – 80 years ago
The U.S. Navy battleship USS Missouri was launched. It was the last battleship built by the USA. Japan signed its surrender document on board it at the end of WWII in September 1945.

30 Jan to 2 Feb 1944 – 80 years ago
World War II – the Battle of Cisterna (Italy). German victory.

31 Jan 1954 – 70 years ago
Death of Edwin H. Armstrong, American inventor and electrical engineer who developed FM radio. (Suicide, aged 63.)

More anniversaries:

You’ll find hundreds more anniversaries for this month in The Date-A-Base Book 2024. The 2025, 2026, 2027 and 2028 editions are also available if you work further ahead. The anniversaries are available as PDF ebooks, Excel spreadsheets, and printed paperback books.

How to use the anniversaries:

If you’d like to know more about how to turn the anniversaries listed here and in The Date-A-Base Books into articles for magazines and newspapers, take a look at our free 68-page guide, Ditch Your Day Job: the easiest way to make a living (or earn some extra cash) as a writer.

It has some terrific bonuses too, including a complete month of anniversaries from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, hundreds of article-writing tips and ideas, plus a 25 percent discount when you buy two or more editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

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31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in December 2023

31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in December 2023

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Here are 31 newsworthy and notable historical anniversaries in December 2023 (listed six months in advance so you have time to write about them)

Historical anniversaries are great for ‘On This Day in History’ features, articles, biographies and other anniversary tie-ins. They’re popular with newspaper and magazine readers and radio stations, and editors, producers and presenters love them. They’re easy to research too. You can also turn them into movies, documentaries, novels, use them to plan events and exhibitions, and much more. (Find out more at the end of this article.)

We’ve randomly picked one anniversary for each day of the month from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, which lists more than 3,000 anniversaries.

1 Dec 1948 – 75 years ago
The board game Scrabble was copyrighted and trademarked, and the first sets went on sale. It was designed by James Brunot of Connecticut, USA. It was a revised version of an earlier game by Alfred Mosher Butts.

2 Dec 1823 – 200 years ago
U.S. President James Monroe issued his ‘Monroe Doctrine’. It stated that European interference in any state in the Americas would be treated as an act of hostility against the USA. This was a warning to European countries that were seeking to annex Latin American countries as they gained independence from Spain and Portugal. The doctrine also declared that the USA would remain neutral in European conflicts, and would not interfere in European affairs, but its sphere of interest included the entire Western Hemisphere.

3 Dec 1998 – 25 years ago
The first commercially successful MP3 player, the Diamond Rio PMP300 went on sale in the USA after an injunction filed by the RIAA was lifted. (It was not the first MP3 player, but it was the first successful one, selling around 200,000 units.)

4 Dec 1973 – 50 years ago
The U.S. space probe Pioneer 10 made its closest approach to Jupiter and sent back the first close-up images of the planet.

5 Dec 1933 – 90 years ago
Prohibition was repealed in the USA after more than 13 years.

6 Dec 1923 – 100 years ago
U.S. President Calvin Coolidge gave the first presidential address to be broadcast on radio.

7 Dec 1963 – 60 years ago
Videotaped instant replay was first used in a live sports broadcast in the USA. CBS broadcast an instant replay of a touchdown during the Army-Navy football game.
(Replays had been used since 1955, using film rather than tape, but it had taken several minutes to process them.)

8 Dec 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II: Colossus Mark I, the world’s first programmable, electronic, digital computer, was completed, tested, and found to work satisfactorily. It was then dismantled and shipped (on 18th January 1944) to Britain’s secret cryptanalysis headquarters at Bletchley Park. It began operating there on 5th February, helping with the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher.

9 Dec 1953 – 70 years ago
Red Scare: General Electric announced that all communist employees would be fired.

10 Dec 1898 – 125 years ago
The Spanish–American War officially ended when the USA and Spain signed the Treaty of Paris.
Spain relinquished its sovereignty of Cuba, and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the USA.
The USA paid compensation of $20 million in exchange for the Philippines.

11 Dec 1993 – 30 years ago
The novelty song Mr Blobby reached No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart. It was also the Christmas No. 1 single in the UK that year. It is regarded as one of the worst pop songs ever recorded.

12 Dec 1963 – 60 years ago
Kenya became independent from the UK. Jomo Kenyatta became its first president.

13 Dec 1948 – 75 years ago
Birth of Lillian Board, South African-born British athlete. 400 m and 800 m sprinter whose career was cut short when she developed cancer and died in 1970, aged 22.

14 Dec 1948 – 75 years ago
Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr and Estle Ray Mann were granted a U.S. patent for their ‘Cathode Ray Amusement Device’ – the first electronic game. (U.S. Patent No. 2,455,992). They built a few prototypes, but it was never produced commercially.

15 Dec 1973 – 50 years ago
The American Psychiatric Association declared that homosexuality was not a mental illness, and removed it from its list of mental disorders.

16 Dec 1773 – 250 years ago
The Boston Tea Party, Massachusetts, USA.
American patriots boarded ships and threw chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company into Boston Harbor, in a protest against the British Parliament’s tax on tea.

17 Dec 1983 – 40 years ago
An IRA car bomb exploded outside Harrods department store in London, killing 3 police officers and 3 members of the public.

18 Dec 1898 – 125 years ago
The first officially recognised land speed record (39.24 mph) was set by Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat of France in a Jeantaud Duc electric car.

19 Dec 1848 – 175 years ago
Death of Emily Brontë, British novelist and poet. Best known for her only novel Wuthering Heights. (Tuberculosis, aged 30.)

20 to 24 Dec 1963 – 60 years ago
Cyprus Crisis: Bloody Christmas.
Intercommunal violence between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. 174 Greek Cypriots and 364 Turkish Cypriots were killed. About 25,000 Turkish Cypriots from 104 villages were displaced into enclaves, and their houses were ransacked or destroyed.

21 Dec 1963 – 60 years ago
The Daleks made their first appearance on the British science fiction TV series Doctor Who.

22 Dec 1943 – 80 years ago
Death of Beatrix Potter, British children’s writer and illustrator. She created animal characters including Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and many more.

23 Dec 1823 – 200 years ago
The poem A Visit From St. Nicholas (commonly known as The Night Before Christmas) was first published (anonymously) in the Sentinel newspaper in Troy, New York, USA. It was written by Clement Clarke Moore.

24 Dec 1923 – 100 years ago
The USA’s first National Christmas Tree was lit up in the grounds of the White House.

25 Dec 1223 – 800 years ago
St. Francis of Assisi created the first nativity scene, in Greccio, Italy, after visiting Jesus’s birthplace in the Holy Land.
It proved enormously popular and inspired other communities to stage their own nativity scenes.

26 Dec 1933 – 90 years ago
The Nissan Motor Company was founded in Tokyo, Japan.

27 Dec 1923 – 100 years ago
Death of Gustave Eiffel, French civil and structural engineer and architect. Best known for designing the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France and the framework for the Statue of Liberty in New York City, USA.

28 Dec 1958 – 65 years ago
The 1958 National Football League (NFL) Championship Game – widely known as ‘the greatest football game ever played’.
The Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants 23 – 17 in sudden-death overtime.
It was the first championship game to go into overtime, and marked the beginning of NFL’s surge in popularity.

29 Dec 1923 – 100 years ago
Russian-born inventor Vladimir K. Zworykin filed a U.S. patent for the first electronic television system. (It was not granted until 1938.)

30 Dec 1948 – 75 years ago
The musical Kiss Me, Kate by Cole Porter opened on Broadway.
It ran for a total of 1,077 performances.
In 1949 it won the first Tony Award presented for Best Musical.

31 Dec 1923 – 100 years ago
The BBC broadcast the chimes of Big Ben for the first time, to welcome in the New Year. The tradition continues to this day.

More anniversaries:

You’ll find hundreds more anniversaries for this month in The Date-A-Base Book 2023. The 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027 and 2028 editions are also available if you work further ahead. The anniversaries are available as PDF ebooks, Excel spreadsheets, and printed paperback books.

How to use the anniversaries:

If you’d like to know more about how to turn the anniversaries listed here and in The Date-A-Base Books into articles for magazines and newspapers, take a look at our free 68-page guide, Ditch Your Day Job: the easiest way to make a living (or earn some extra cash) as a writer.

It has some terrific bonuses too, including a complete month of anniversaries from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, hundreds of article-writing tips and ideas, plus a 25 percent discount when you buy two or more editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

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30 newsworthy historical anniversaries in November 2023

30 newsworthy historical anniversaries in November 2023

Posted on by admin

Here are 30 newsworthy and notable historical anniversaries in November 2023 (listed six months in advance so you have time to write about them)

Historical anniversaries are great for ‘On This Day in History’ features, articles, biographies and other anniversary tie-ins. They’re popular with newspaper and magazine readers and radio stations, and editors, producers and presenters love them. They’re easy to research too. You can also turn them into movies, documentaries, novels, use them to plan events and exhibitions, and much more. (Find out more at the end of this article.)

We’ve randomly picked one anniversary for each day of the month from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, which lists more than 3,000 anniversaries.

1 Nov 1848 – 175 years ago
The first railway bookstall was opened by W. H. Smith at Euston Station, London, UK.

2 Nov 1948 – 75 years ago
Harry S. Truman was re-elected as U.S. President for a second term, in the greatest election upset in U.S. history. Every prediction had indicated that Thomas E. Dewey would win. The Chicago Daily Tribune famously (and erroneously) announced Dewey’s ‘victory’ on the front page of its 3rd November issue.

3 Nov 1983 – 40 years ago
In a referendum, the white citizens of South Africa voted to approve the Tricameral Parliament. Indian and coloured South Africans would be represented by new, separate parliamentary chambers, while blacks would continue to be excluded. The new parliament was established in September 1984 and remained in effect until 1994.

4 Nov 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of Alfred (‘Freddy’) Heineken, Dutch brewery executive. He turned Heineken into a worldwide brand using innovative marketing methods. (Died 2002.)

5 Nov 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II: the Vatican City was bombed – the only time this happened during the war. The perpetrators remained a mystery for decades, but it is now known that Italian Fascists dropped five bombs from an unmarked plane in an attempt to knock out the radio station, which they believed was broadcasting military messages to the enemy. Four of the bombs exploded, causing some damage, but no deaths were reported.

6 Nov 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II: the Soviet Red Army recaptured Kiev (now in Ukraine) from the Germans. The Germans had destroyed numerous historic buildings.

7 Nov 1973 – 50 years ago
The War Powers Resolution came into effect in the USA. It limits the President’s power to commit the country to an armed conflict without congressional approval.

8 Nov 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of Jack Kilby, American electrical engineer. Joint winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for co-inventing the integrated circuit. He also designed the first pocket calculator. (Died 2005.)

9 Nov 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of Alice Coachman, American athlete. The first African American woman to win an Olympic gold medal (1948, high jump).

10 Nov 1983 – 40 years ago
American computer student Fred Cohen demonstrated the first computer virus at a computer security seminar. He had created the virus with computer scientist Len Adleman on 3rd November.

11 Nov 1923 – 100 years ago
The eternal flame at the tomb of the unknown solder under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France was lit. It was the first modern-day eternal flame in Europe.

12 Nov 1933 – 90 years ago
The first known photographs of the Loch Ness Monster were taken by Hugh Gray, a local man, during one of his regular Sunday walks. (1 photo was later confirmed to be a hoax, and 4 of the others were blank.)

13 Nov 1973 – 50 years ago
Britain declared a state of emergency as a strike by coal miners caused supplies to dwindle. A 3-Day Week was introduced to conserve supplies.

14 Nov 1948 – 75 years ago
Birth of King Charles III of the United Kingdom.

15 Nov 1963 – 60 years ago
The island of Surtsey, off the coast of Iceland, was ‘born’ when an under-water volcano erupted and rose above the surface of the sea.

16 Nov 1873 – 150 years ago
Birth of W. C. Handy, (‘the Father of the Blues’), American blues/jazz composer and trumpet player who introduced Delta blues to a national audience.

17 Nov 1873 – 150 years ago
Budapest, the capital city of Hungary, was formed when the cities of Buda, Pest and Óbuda merged.

18 Nov 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of Alan B. Shepard, American astronaut. The first American in space. (Died 1998).

19 Nov 1523 – 500 years ago
Pope Clemens VII was elected.

20 Nov 1923 – 100 years ago
American inventor Garrett Morgan was granted a U.S. patent for the three-position traffic light. (U.S. Patent No. 1,475,024.)

21 Nov 1953 – 70 years ago
British scientists revealed that the fossilised skull of ‘Piltdown Man’, discovered in England in 1912 and thought to be from one of the earliest humans, was a hoax constructed from the skulls of 3 different species.

22 Nov 1963 – 60 years ago
U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas by suspected gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President.

23 Nov 1963 – 60 years ago
The first episode of the science fiction television series Doctor Who was broadcast in the UK. It is the longest-running and most successful science fiction TV series in the world.

24 Nov 1923 – 100 years ago
Radio Belgium began broadcasting.

25 Nov 1923 – 100 years ago
The first two-way transatlantic radio broadcast. Amateur radio enthusiast Leon Deloy from Nice, France conversed with two other amateur radio operators, Fred Schnell and with John Reinartz, in the USA. They sent Morse code messages using shortwave radios.

26 Nov 1948 – 75 years ago
The first Polaroid instant cameras (the model 95 Land Camera) went on sale, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

27 Nov 1998 – 25 years ago
The Sega Dreamcast video games console was released in Japan. It was Sega’s last games console. (North America: 9th September 1999, Europe: 14th October 1999.)

28 Nov 1958 – 65 years ago
The USA carried out its first successful full-range flight of an Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM).
The Soviet Union had already fully tested its first ICBM (the R-7) in August 1957.

29 Nov 1898 – 125 years ago
Birth of C. S. Lewis, Irish-born British novelist, theologian and broadcaster. Best known for The Chronicles of Narnia.

30 Nov 1993 – 30 years ago
The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (commonly known as the Brady Bill) was signed into law in the USA by U.S. President Bill Clinton. It required a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases, and background checks of prospective buyers.
(Effective from 28th February 1994.)

More anniversaries:

You’ll find hundreds more anniversaries for this month in The Date-A-Base Book 2023. The 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027 and 2028 editions are also available if you work further ahead. The anniversaries are available as PDF ebooks, Excel spreadsheets, and printed paperback books.

How to use the anniversaries:

If you’d like to know more about how to turn the anniversaries listed here and in The Date-A-Base Books into articles for magazines and newspapers, take a look at our free 68-page guide, Ditch Your Day Job: the easiest way to make a living (or earn some extra cash) as a writer.

It has some terrific bonuses too, including a complete month of anniversaries from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, hundreds of article-writing tips and ideas, plus a 25 percent discount when you buy two or more editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

Share this:

31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in October 2023

31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in October 2023

Posted on by admin

Here are 31 newsworthy and notable historical anniversaries in October 2023 (listed six months in advance so you have time to write about them)

Historical anniversaries are great for ‘On This Day in History’ features, articles, biographies and other anniversary tie-ins. They’re popular with newspaper and magazine readers and radio stations, and editors, producers and presenters love them. They’re easy to research too. You can also turn them into movies, documentaries, novels, use them to plan events and exhibitions, and much more. (Find out more at the end of this article.)

We’ve randomly picked one anniversary for each day of the month from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, which lists more than 3,000 anniversaries.

1 Oct 1873 – 150 years ago
Death of Edwin Landseer, British artist and sculptor. Known for his animal paintings, and for the lion sculptures at the base of Nelson’s Column in London.

2 Oct 1973 – 50 years ago
Death of Paavo Nurmi, Finnish middle- and long-distance runner. Olympic gold medallist (9 times). He set 25 world records.

3 – 4 Oct 1993 – 30 years ago
Somali Civil War – the Battle of Mogadishu. Also known as the First Battle of Mogadishu, the Battle of the Black Sea, or the Black Hawk Down incident. After the battle, the Somalis dragged dead U.S. soldiers through the streets – an event that was broadcast on U.S. television. This led to a public outcry and is thought to have influenced the USA’s decision not to intervene in the Rwandan genocide.

4 Oct 1958 – 54 years ago
The French Fifth Republic was established.

5 Oct 1948 – 75 years ago
The Ashgabat earthquake, Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic (now Turkmenistan). 110,000 people were killed (some sources say 176,000). It was one of the deadliest earthquakes in human history. Some have speculated that it was caused by Soviet atomic bomb tests.

6 Oct 1923 – 100 years ago
The Soviet Union adopted the ‘Eternal Calendar’. Each week had 5 days, there were 6 weeks to a month, and all months had 30 days. The remaining 5 days were national holidays and were given names rather than dates. In 1931 the calendar was replaced with one with 6-day weeks. It used the Gregorian calendar from 1940 onwards.

7 Oct 1943 – 80 years ago
Death of Radclyffe Hall, British writer and poet. Best known for her controversial novel The Well of Loneliness, which was banned in Britain because of its descriptions of lesbianism.

8 Oct 1873 – 150 years ago
Indiana Women’s Prison opened in Indianapolis (as the Indiana Reformatory Institute). It was the first women’s correctional facility in the USA.

9 Oct 1873 – 150 years ago
Birth of Charles Rudolph Walgreen, American pharmacist and businessman. Founder of the Walgreens chain of pharmacies.

10 Oct 1973 – 50 years ago
U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after being charged with tax evasion. He was succeeded by Gerald Ford on 6th December.

11 Oct 1983 – 40 years ago
The last hand-cranked telephones in the USA (in the village of Bryant Pond, Maine) went out of service as the local exchange was upgraded to a modern direct-dial system.

12 Oct 1773 – 250 years ago
The first psychiatric hospital in the USA opened in Williamsburg, Virginia. The Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds is now known as Eastern State Hospital.

13 Oct 1923 – 100 years ago
Ankara became the capital of Turkey.

14 Oct 1963 – 60 years ago
The French-language folk song Dominique by The Singing Nun was released. It became a worldwide hit throughout December, while the world was reeling from the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

15 Oct 1963 – 60 years ago
The term ‘Beatlemania’ first appeared in the Daily Mirror newspaper in the UK. It described the intense, frenzied reaction of fans of the Beatles.

16 Oct 1923 – 100 years ago
The Walt Disney Company was founded by Walt and Roy Disney (as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio).

17 Oct 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II: the Burma Railway (also known as the Thailand–Burma Railway or the Death Railway) was completed. The Japanese built it using Asian labourers and Allied prisoners-of-war, thousands of whom died.
(One of the railway bridges is the famous Bridge over the River Kwai.)

18 Oct 1958 – 65 years ago
The world’s first video game, Tennis for Two, was introduced. It was developed by American physicist William Higinbotham at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The display screen was an oscilloscope. At the time, it was only known inside the lab, and was shown to visitors on open days.

19 Oct 1943 – 80 years ago
The antibiotic streptomycin was first isolated by Albert Schatz at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA. It was the first effective cure for tuberculosis. (The discovery was originally credited to his supervisor, Selman Waksman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work. The discovery was the subject of a litigation case and they are both now listed as co-discoverers.)

20 Oct 1973 – 50 years ago
Sydney Opera House in Australia was opened by Queen Elizabeth II.

21 Oct 1923 – 100 years ago
The world’s first planetarium projector (made by Zeiss) opened at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany.

22 Oct 1983 – 40 years ago
Two correctional officers were killed by inmates at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. The prison went into indefinite lockdown for the next 23 years, with prisoners isolated in their cells for 23 hours per day. This inspired the ‘supermax’ model of prisons.

23 Oct 1998 – 25 years ago
Swatch Internet Time was introduced. It divides each day into 1,000 ‘beats’.

24 Oct 1933 – 90 years ago
Birth of Ronnie and Reggie Kray, (the Kray twins), British gangsters who ruled the East End of London in the 1950s and 60s.
(Died 1995 and 2000 respectively.)

25 Oct 1983 – 40 years ago
Microsoft Word 1.0 was released. It was the first version of the popular word processor, and Microsoft’s first full-featured application.

26 Oct 1958 – 65 years ago
The Boeing 707, the USA’s first jet airliner, went into commercial service with Pan American World Airways.
The first flight was from New York to Paris, France.

27 Oct 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of Roy Lichtenstein, American Pop artist. Known for his comic book-style paintings. (Died 1997.)

28 Oct 1943 – 80 years ago
The Philadelphia Experiment. A U.S. Navy escort ship, the USS Eldridge, was apparently rendered invisible while work was being carried out to hide it from enemy radar. Some claim the ship travelled through time and was seen briefly over 200 miles away.
The story is widely regarded as a hoax, but has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories and a Hollywood film.

29 Oct 1923 – 100 years ago
The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became its first president.

30 Oct 1983 – 40 years ago
The online videotext service Viewtron was launched in the USA. Although it was primarily a news service, most subscribers used it for email and live chat, and it never made a profit. It was discontinued in March 1986.

31 Oct 1993 – 30 years ago
Death of Federico Fellini, Italian film director and screenwriter.

More anniversaries:

You’ll find hundreds more anniversaries for this month in The Date-A-Base Book 2023. The 2024, 2025 and 2026 and 2027 editions are also available if you work further ahead. The anniversaries are available as PDF ebooks, Excel spreadsheets, and printed paperback books. The 2028 edition will be available from 5th April 2023.

How to use the anniversaries:

If you’d like to know more about how to turn the anniversaries listed here and in The Date-A-Base Books into articles for magazines and newspapers, take a look at our free 68-page guide, Ditch Your Day Job: the easiest way to make a living (or earn some extra cash) as a writer.

It has some terrific bonuses too, including a complete month of anniversaries from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, hundreds of article-writing tips and ideas, plus a 25 percent discount when you buy two or more editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

Share this:

30 newsworthy historical anniversaries in September 2023

30 newsworthy historical anniversaries in September 2023

Posted on by admin

Here are 30 newsworthy and notable historical anniversaries in September 2023 (listed six months in advance so you have time to write about them)

Historical anniversaries are great for ‘On This Day in History’ features, articles, biographies and other anniversary tie-ins. They’re popular with newspaper and magazine readers and radio stations, and editors, producers and presenters love them. They’re easy to research too. You can also turn them into films, documentaries, novels, use them to plan events and exhibitions, and much more. (Find out more at the end of this article.)

We’ve randomly picked one anniversary for each day of the month from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, which lists more than 3,000 anniversaries.

1 Sep 1923 – 100 years ago
The Great Kanto earthquake, Japan. The deadliest earthquake in Japanese history. Over 140,000 people were killed and 1.9 million made homeless.

2 Sep 1973 – 50 years ago
Death of J. R. R. Tolkien, British fantasy writer, poet, scholar and educator. Best known for his novels The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

3 Sep 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II: Italy surrendered to the Allies and signed the Armistice of Cassibile. The Allies invaded Italy the same day (see below). (The armistice was announced to the public on 8th September.)

4 Sep 1998 – 25 years ago
Google, the internet search company, was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both students at Stanford University, California, USA. (The company was initially based in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park.)

5 Sep 1953 – 70 years ago
The world’s first privately operated atomic reactor began operating at North Carolina State University, USA.

6 Sep 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of Peter II, last King of Yugoslavia. (Died 1970.)

7 Sep 1923 – 100 years ago
Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organisation, was founded.

8 Sep 2003 – 20 years ago
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed 261 lawsuits against alleged music file-sharers. They included a 12-year-old schoolgirl, whose parents paid $2,000 to settle the case the next day.

9 Sep 1948 – 75 years ago
The People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea) was established, headed by Kim Il Sung

10 Sep 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II: the Germans occupied Rome, Italy, and took over the protection of the Vatican City.

11 Sep 1973 – 50 years ago
General Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile in a military coup, overthrowing President Salvador Allende who apparently immediately committed suicide. (Some claim he was killed and the suicide was staged.)

12 Sep 1958 – 65 years ago
The world’s first working integrated circuit was demonstrated by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments. (He had built it while the plant was shut down for holidays – as a new employee he was not entitled to holidays.)

13 Sep 1948 – 75 years ago
Margaret Chase Smith became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate, and the first to serve in both houses of Congress.

14 Sep 1953 – 70 years ago
Nikita Khrushchev became leader of the Soviet Union.

15 Sep 1963 – 60 years ago
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Birmingham, Alabama, USA. A bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded at the African American church. 4 children were killed and 22 injured.

16 Sep 1963 – 60 years ago
Malaysia was founded when Malaya united with Sabah, Sarawak, and Singapore. (Singapore was expelled in 1965.)

17 Sep 1953 – 70 years ago
The first successful separation of Siamese twins where both twins survived. 8-week-old Carolyn Anne and Catherine Anne Mouton were joined at the waist and lower spine and shared a lower intestine. They were separated at the Ochsner Foundation Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA in a three-hour operation.

18 Sep 1873 – 150 years ago
The Panic of 1873. The U.S. bank Jay Cooke & Company failed after overextending its investment in the Northern Pacific Railway. This contributed to the Panic of 1873, which triggered an economic crisis in North America and Europe, and led to the Long Depression – two decades of stagnation. On 20th September (‘Black Friday’) the New York Stock Exchange was forced to close for the first time in its history. It remained closed for 10 days.

19 Sep 1983 – 40 years ago
Saint Kitts and Nevis became independent from the UK.

20 Sep 1848 – 175 years ago
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was founded. It is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publishes the scientific journal Science.

21 Sep 1993 to 4 Oct – 30 years ago
Russian constitutional crisis. Russian President Boris Yeltsin suspended parliament, attempted to disband the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, and called for new elections. He was impeached and replaced by vice president Aleksandr Rutskoy. On 4th October he ordered the Russian Army to storm the Supreme Soviet building with tanks and arrest the leaders of the resistance. Up to 2,000 people were killed (official figure: 187).

22 Sep 1973 – 50 years ago
Henry Kissinger became U.S. Secretary of State. He was the first naturalised citizen to hold the office.

23 Sep 1848 – 175 years ago
The first commercial production of chewing gum. American businessman John B. Curtis produced his batch of chewing gum at his home in Bangor, Maine. He called it State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum.

24 Sep 1948 – 75 years ago
The Honda Motor Company was founded.

25 Sep 1963 – 60 years ago
Lord Denning’s report on the Profumo Affair was published in the UK. It found that the former Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, lied to the House of Commons about his relationship with Christine Keeler. She was the alleged mistress of a Russian spy, who was thought to be using their relationship to obtain classified information about British security.

26 Sep 1963 to 13 Oct – 60 years ago
Hurricane Flora, one of the deadliest hurricanes in history, killed 7,193 people in the Caribbean region, especially in Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

27 Sep 1898 – 125 years ago
Birth of Vincent Youmans, American Broadway composer and producer. Best known for the musical No, No Nanette and the song Tea for Two.

28 Sep 1923 – 100 years ago
The first issue of the BBC’s radio and television listings magazine Radio Times was published.

29 Sep 1923 – 100 years ago
The British Mandate for Palestine came into effect. Britain took control of Mandatory Palestine (formerly part of the Turkish Empire) until 1948 when Israel became an independent state.

30 Sep 1948 – 75 years ago
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) froze all outstanding television broadcast licence applications. It was inundated with hundreds of applications and there were several technical hurdles to be overcome, including the development of colour transmissions and interference between adjacent stations’ transmitters. The planned 6-month freeze lasted for 4 years.

More anniversaries:

You’ll find hundreds more anniversaries for this month in The Date-A-Base Book 2023. The 2024, 2025 and 2026 and 2027 editions are also available if you work further ahead. The anniversaries are available as PDF ebooks, Excel spreadsheets, and printed paperback books.

The 2028 edition will be available from April 2023. Find out more at ideas4writers.com.

How to use the anniversaries:

If you’d like to know more about how to turn the anniversaries listed here and in The Date-A-Base Books into articles for magazines and newspapers, take a look at our free 68-page guide, Ditch Your Day Job: the easiest way to make a living (or earn some extra cash) as a writer.

It has some terrific bonuses too, including a complete month of anniversaries from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, 301 article-writing ideas and tips, plus a 25 percent discount when you buy two or more editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

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31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in August 2023

31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in August 2023

Posted on by admin

Here are 31 newsworthy and notable historical anniversaries in August 2023
(listed six months in advance so you have time to write about them)

Historical anniversaries are great for ‘On This Day in History’ features, articles, biographies and other anniversary tie-ins. They’re popular with newspaper and magazine readers and radio stations, and editors, producers and presenters love them. They’re easy to research too. You can also turn them into films, documentaries, novels, use them to plan events and exhibitions, and much more. (Find out more at the end of this article.)

We’ve randomly picked one anniversary for each day of the month from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, which lists more than 3,000 anniversaries.

1 Aug 1993 – 30 years ago
1 Apr to Oct The Great Mississippi and Missouri Rivers Flood of 1993 peaked on this date. It was one of the most damaging floods in U.S. history. Heavy rainfall began in April and continued into October, with some places under water for nearly 200 days. 1st August is referred to as the flood’s anniversary.

2 Aug 1923 – 100 years ago
Death of Warren G. Harding, 29th President of the United States (1921–23). Died in office. Succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge.

3 Aug 1948 – 75 years ago
Whittaker Chambers, a former member of the U.S. Communist Party, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Alger Hiss had secretly been a communist while working for the State Department. Hiss denied the charge. On 25th August the hearings were televised and Chambers and Hiss dramatically confronted each other on ‘Confrontation Day’. (In January 1950, Hiss was convicted of perjury and imprisoned for 3.5 years. He maintained his innocence until his death in 1996, and sued Chambers for defamation.) The case is still debated to this day. Many believe Hiss was a Soviet spy, but it is difficult to prove or disprove.

4 Aug 1958 – 65 years ago
Billboard magazine published its first Hot 100 singles chart. It is the music industry’s standard record chart in the USA. The first #1 record on the chart was Poor Little Fool by Ricky Nelson.

5 Aug 1953 to December – 70 years ago
Operation Big Switch. All remaining prisoners taken during the Korean War were repatriated.
(Operation Little Switch in April–May 1953 was the repatriation of sick and wounded prisoners.)

6 Aug 1973 – 50 years ago
Death of Fulgencio Batista, President/dictator of Cuba (1933–44, 1952–59)

7 Aug 1948 – 75 years ago
Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen became the first woman to win four Olympic gold medals (at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London). On 2nd August, when she won the 100 metres, she became the first Dutch athlete to win an Olympic title in athletics.

8 Aug 1963 – 60 years ago
The Great Train Robbery, Ledburn, Buckinghamshire, England. £2.6 million was stolen in one of the UK’s most infamous robberies. The bulk of the money was never recovered.

9 Aug 1898 – 125 years ago
German inventor Rudolf Diesel was granted a U.S. patent for the Diesel internal combustion engine.
(U.S. Patent No. 608,845.)

10 Aug 1948 – 75 years ago
The first episode of the hidden-camera/practical joke television show Candid Camera was broadcast in the USA.
It ran for over 1,000 episodes and ended in 2004. (It began as the radio show Candid Microphone.)

11 Aug 1973 – 50 years ago
Hip-hop (the music genre) was invented by Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc at a back-to-school party in The Bronx, New York City, USA.

12 Aug 1848 – 175 years ago
Death of George Stephenson, (‘the Father of Railways’), British civil and mechanical engineer who developed rail transport and built innovative steam locomotives including the famous Rocket.

13 Aug 1923 – 100 years ago
Gustav Stresemann became Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Germany.

14 Aug 1848 – 175 years ago
Oregon Territory was established in the USA. (It was admitted as a U.S. state in 1859.)

15 Aug 1948 – 75 years ago
The Republic of Korea (South Korea) was established.

16 Aug 1948 – 75 years ago
Death of Babe Ruth, American baseball player.

17 Aug 1953 – 70 years ago
Narcotics Anonymous was founded in California, USA.

18 Aug 1873 – 150 years ago
The first successful ascent of Mount Whitney, California – the highest summit in the contiguous United States.

19 Aug 1923 – 100 years ago
Death of Vilfredo Pareto, Italian economist, sociologist and civil engineer. He made several notable contributions to the field of economics. Best known for the Pareto principle: 80 percent of consequences come from 20 percent of causes.

20 Aug 1923 – 100 years ago
The USA’s first rigid airship, USS Shenandoah, was launched at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey.
It made its first flight on 4th September.
It crashed during a storm in September 1925, when fourteen people were killed.

21 Aug 1953 – 70 years ago
The UK première of the romantic comedy film Roman Holiday. It featured Audrey Hepburn in her first starring role.
U.S. première: 27th August. Released: 2nd September.

22 Aug 1933 – 90 years ago
The world’s first televised boxing match: Archie Sexton vs. Laurie Raiteri in London, England.

23 Aug 1973 – 50 years ago
Stockholm syndrome: a bank robber attempted to rob the Kreditbanken in Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm, Sweden. When police entered the bank, he opened fire and took four people hostage. He held them at the bank, with the help of a friend who arrived later, until 28th August, when police used tear gas to force the criminals to surrender.
The hostages developed a psychological bond with their captors and expressed sympathy for them, leading to the term ‘Stockholm syndrome’.

24 Aug 1873 – 150 years ago
The first recorded ascent of the Mount of the Holy Cross in Colorado, USA.
During this ascent, the elusive cross-shaped snowfield that gives the mountain its name was photographed for the first time.

25 Aug 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II: British Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten became Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia.

26 Aug 1723 – 300 years ago
Death of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, (‘the father of microbiology’), Dutch microscopist and microbiologist.

27 Aug 1948 – 75 years ago
Death of Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice of the United States (1930–41), U.S. Secretary of State (1921–25).

28 Aug 1963 – 60 years ago
March on Washington/I Have a Dream.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., USA during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The civil rights rally was attended by approximately 200,000 supporters.

29 Aug 1898 – 125 years ago
The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company was founded in Akron, Ohio, USA.

30 Aug 1963 – 60 years ago
The hotline between the President of the USA and the leader of the Soviet Union went into operation, allowing them to communicate easily during a crisis. The first hotline was a teletype machine, later replaced by fax, then by secure email.
It was first used in 1967 during the Egypt–Israel War.

31 Aug 1998 – 25 years ago
North Korea allegedly launched its first satellite, Kwangmyongsong, and declared it had been successfully placed in orbit.
Officials outside North Korea have never detected this satellite in orbit, and the launch is considered to have failed.

More anniversaries:

You’ll find hundreds more anniversaries for this month in The Date-A-Base Book 2023. The 2024, 2025 and 2026 and 2027 editions are also available if you work further ahead. The anniversaries are available as PDF ebooks, Excel spreadsheets, and printed paperback books.

The 2028 edition will be available from April 2023. Find out more at ideas4writers.com.

How to use the anniversaries:

If you’d like to know more about how to turn the anniversaries listed here and in The Date-A-Base Books into articles for magazines and newspapers, take a look at our free 68-page guide, Ditch Your Day Job: the easiest way to make a living (or earn some extra cash) as a writer.

It has some terrific bonuses too, including a complete month of anniversaries from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, 301 article-writing ideas and tips, plus a 25 percent discount when you buy two or more editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

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31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in July 2023

31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in July 2023

Posted on by admin

Here are 31 newsworthy and notable historical anniversaries in July 2023
(listed six months in advance so you have time to write about them)

Historical anniversaries are great for “On This Day in History” features, articles, biographies and other anniversary tie-ins. They’re popular with newspaper and magazine readers and radio stations, and editors, producers and presenters love them. They’re easy to research too. You can also turn them into films, documentaries, novels, use them to plan events and exhibitions, and much more. (Find out more at the end of this article.)

We’ve randomly picked one anniversary for each day of the month from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, which lists more than 3,000 anniversaries.

1 Jul 1948 – 75 years ago
New York International Airport (originally Idlewild Airport) was officially opened.
(It was renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1963.)

2 Jul 1973 – 50 years ago
The National Black Network (NBN) launched in the USA. It was the first national radio network wholly owned by African Americans.

3 Jul 1423 – 600 years ago
Birth of Louis XI, King of France (1461–83).

4 Jul 1623 – 400 years ago
Death of William Byrd, English Renaissance composer. Regarded as one of the greatest British composers. Best known for his sacred music.

5 Jul 1948 – 75 years ago
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) began operating.

6 Jul 1933 – 90 years ago
The first Major League Baseball All-Star Game was played, at Comiskey Park, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

7 Jul 1948 – 75 years ago
The first six enlisted women were sworn into the regular U.S. Navy.

8 Jul 1933 – 90 years ago
Great Depression: the Public Works Administration (PWA) began operating in the USA. Its purpose was to build large-scale public projects including dams, bridges, schools, hospitals and warships to provide employment and stimulate the economy.

9 Jul 1958 – 65 years ago
Lituya Bay megatsunami, Alaska, USA.
An earthquake caused 90 million tons of rock to fall several hundred metres into the bay. The resulting tsunami destroyed vegetation up to 1,722 feet (525 metres) above the bay and sent a 98- foot (30-metre) wave across the bay.
It remains the largest and most significant megatsunami of modern times.

10 Jul 1973 – 50 years ago
John Paul Getty III, the 16-year-old grandson of the American oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, was kidnapped in Rome, Italy.
In November the kidnappers cut off one of his ears and sent it to a newspaper.
He was released in December after a ransom was paid.
(The kidnapping scarred him for life and he became addicted to drugs and alcohol, leading to an overdose, stroke, and severe disability. He died in 2011, aged 54.)

11 Jul 1848 – 175 years ago
Waterloo railway station in London opened.

12 Jul 1963 – 60 years ago
The Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, killed their first victim, 16-year-old Pauline Reade, on Saddleworth Moor, north-west England.

13 Jul 1923 – 100 years ago
The Hollywood Sign was officially dedicated in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA.
(It was originally erected as a temporary advertisement for a housing development, and read ‘Hollywoodland’.)

14 Jul 1983 – 40 years ago
Nintendo released the arcade video game Mario Bros in Japan. (USA: 20th July.)

15 Jul 1948 – 75 years ago
The British branch of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was founded in London.
(Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in the USA in 1935.)

16 Jul 1723 – 300 years ago
Birth of Sir Joshua Reynolds, English portrait artist.

17 Jul 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of John Cooper, British racing car designer. Co-founder of the Cooper Car Company (with his father, Charles). He also designed the Mini Cooper. (Died 2000.)

18 Jul 1948 – 75 years ago
Argentine racing driver Juan Manuel Fangio made his Formula One debut in the 1948 French Grand Prix.
He went on to win the F1 Driver’s Championship five times (1951, 1954–57).

19 to 20 Jul 1848 – 175 years ago
The Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention in the USA, was held in Seneca Falls, New York.

20 Jul or 20 Jun 1923 – 100 years ago
Death of Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary and guerrilla leader. (Assassinated).

21 Jul 1873 – 150 years ago
American outlaw Jesse James and the James-Younger gang staged their first train robbery. They derailed a Rock Island Line express train near Adair, Iowa, and stole $3,000 (equivalent to $64,000 today).

22 Jul 1933 – 90 years ago
American aviator Wiley Post completed the first solo flight around the world.
He flew 15,596 miles in 7 days, 18 hours and 49 minutes.

23 Jul 1773 – 250 years ago
Birth of Thomas Brisbane, British Army officer, colonial administrator, and astronomer. Governor of New South Wales (1821–25).
The city of Brisbane, Australia was named in his honour.

24 Jul 1923 – 100 years ago
The Treaty of Lausanne was signed in Switzerland. It was the final treaty of WWI and defined the boundaries of modern Turkey.

25 Jul 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II: Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was forced out of office. He was succeeded by Pietro Badoglio (as Prime Minister).
This marked the end of Italy’s alliance with Germany.

26 Jul 1958 – 65 years ago
Debutantes were presented at the British royal court for the last time.

27 Jul 1953 – 70 years ago
The Korean War ended. The Korean Armistice Treaty was signed at Panmunjom and the 38th parallel became the official boundary between communist North Korea and anti-communist South Korea. (Tensions continued unabated.)

28 Jul 1933 – 90 years ago
Western Union delivered the first singing telegram – to American singer Rudy Vallee in New York on his 32nd birthday.

29 Jul 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of Jim Marshall, British electrical engineer and businessman. Founder of Marshall Amplification. (Died 2012.)

30 Jul 1898 – 125 years ago
The world’s first advertisement for a motor car appeared in newspapers in the USA.
The ad for the Winton Motor Carriage Company in Cleveland, Ohio invited readers to ‘Dispense with a horse’.

31 Jul 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of Ahmet Ertegun, Turkish-born American record company executive. Co-founder and President of Atlantic Records.
He was one of the most significant and influential figures in American popular music, and discovered many leading musicians. (Died 2006.)

More anniversaries:

You’ll find hundreds more anniversaries for this month in The Date-A-Base Book 2023. The 2024, 2025 and 2026 and 2027 editions are also available if you work further ahead. The 2028 edition will be available from April 2023. Find out more at ideas4writers.com.

How to use the anniversaries:

If you’d like to know more about how to turn the anniversaries listed here and in The Date-A-Base Books into articles for magazines and newspapers, take a look at our free 68-page guide, Ditch Your Day Job: the easiest way to make a living (or earn some extra cash) as a writer.

It has some terrific bonuses too, including a complete month of anniversaries from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, 301 article-writing ideas and tips, plus a 25 percent discount when you buy two or more editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

Share this:

30 newsworthy historical anniversaries in June 2023

30 newsworthy historical anniversaries in June 2023

Posted on by admin

Here are 30 newsworthy and notable historical anniversaries in June 2023
(listed six months in advance so you have time to write about them)

Historical anniversaries are great for “On This Day in History” features, articles, biographies and other anniversary tie-ins. They’re popular with newspaper and magazine readers and radio stations, and editors, producers and presenters love them. They’re easy to research too. You can also turn them into films, documentaries, novels, use them to plan events and exhibitions, and much more. (Find out more at the end of this article.)

We’ve randomly picked one anniversary for each day of the month from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, which lists more than 3,000 anniversaries.

1 Jun 1998 – 25 years ago
The European Central Bank was established in Frankfurt, Germany.

2 Jun 1953 – 70 years ago
The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey, London.
This was also the first event where the British TV audience (20 million) was greater than the radio audience (12 million).

3 Jun 1898 – 125 years ago
Death of Samuel Plimsoll, British politician and social reformer. Best known for devising the Plimsoll line on a ship’s hull that indicates the minimum safe distance between the deck and the water line.

4 Jun 1948 – 75 years ago
Daniel François Malan (commonly known as D. F. Malan) became Prime Minister of South Africa.
He championed Afrikaner nationalism, and his government implemented apartheid.

5 Jun 1963 – 60 years ago
Profumo affair: British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, resigned after it was revealed he had lied to the House of Commons about his affair with dancer/showgirl Christine Keeler.

6 Jun 1948 – 75 years ago
Death of Louis Lumière, French inventor, photographic pioneer and film-maker. He developed an early film camera and projector with his brother, Auguste, and made the first-ever movie.

7 Jun 1963 – 60 years ago
The Rolling Stones released their first single – a cover version of Chuck Berry’s song Come On.

8 Jun 1948 – 75 years ago
The first Porsche sports car (model 356) was completed. The hand-built aluminium prototype was road-certified on this date, entered into its first race, and won its class. The Porsche 356 would become the company’s first production car, and remained in production until 1965.

9 Jun 1898 – 125 years ago
Britain leased Hong Kong from China for 99 years and it became a British Crown Colony.
(It was transferred back to China in 1997.)

10 Jun 1923 – 100 years ago
Birth of Robert Maxwell, Czech-born British newspaper publisher, media proprietor and politician.
(Died 1991, after which serious discrepancies were found in his company’s finances, and he was found to have misappropriated the Mirror Group pension fund.)

11 Jun 1998 – 25 years ago
Death of Catherine Cookson, British novelist. Known for her stories set in the industrial north-east of England.
At the time of her death she was Britain’s most widely read novelist.

12 Jun 1948 – 75 years ago
The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act was enacted in the USA. It enabled women to serve as regular members of the U.S. Armed Forces.
The first women were sworn in on 7th July. (Before this, women could only serve as nurses in the military, except during times of war.)

13 Jun 1773 – 250 years ago
Birth of Thomas Young, British scientist. He made several notable contributions to science, including the wave theory of light, and studies of eyesight, physiology, language and musical harmony. He also helped translate Egyptian hieroglyphs.
His work influenced later scientists including William Herschel, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein.

14 Jun 1923 – 100 years ago
American inventor Charles Francis Jenkins transmitted the first moving silhouette images using an experimental wireless television system, which he called ‘Radiovision’.

15 Jun 1993 – 30 years ago
Death of James Hunt, British racing driver, sports writer and television commentator. Formula One world champion in 1976.

16 Jun 1723? – 300 years ago
Birth of Adam Smith, (‘the Father of Economics’), Scottish economist and philosopher.
Known for his book The Wealth of Nations – the first modern work on economics.
(Baptised on this date – his date of birth is unknown.)

17 Jun 1873 – 150 years ago
Women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony was found guilty of voting in the 1872 U.S. presidential election, in which only men were allowed to vote.
She was fined $100 (equivalent to about $2,500 today).

18 Jun 1923 – 100 years ago
The first Checker Cab taxi rolled off the production line in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA.

19 Jun 1623 – 400 years ago
Birth of Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, inventor, theologian and philosopher. He invented one of the first mechanical calculators.
The computer programming language Pascal was named in his honour.

20 Jun 1923 or 20 July – 100 years ago
Death of Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary and guerilla leader. (Assassinated.)

21 Jun 1948 – 75 years ago
The ship HMT Empire Windrush docked in London, bringing the first large group of immigrants from the West Indies to the UK.

22 Jun 1983 – 40 years ago
The U.S. space shuttle Challenger retrieved a satellite from orbit for the first time.

23 Jun 1993 – 30 years ago
Lorena Bobbitt of Virginia, USA cut off her husband John’s penis with a kitchen knife after he sexually assaulted her. She then drove off and threw the severed penis out of her car window. (It was found and successfully reattached. At her trial the jury found her not guilty due to insanity. She also accused him of raping her, and of causing her actual harm and threatening harm, but he was acquitted.)

24 Jun 1948 to 12 May 1949 – 75 years ago
Cold War: The Berlin Blockade and Airlift.
The Soviet Union began a rail, road and canal blockade of Berlin, cutting off all routes between West Germany and West Berlin.
The Allies launched a massive airlift – over 200,000 flights – to take in nearly 9,000 tons of supplies each day. One plane laden with supplies landed every minute.

25 Jun 1973 – 50 years ago
Watergate scandal: White House Counsel John Dean, testifying before the Watergate committee, became the first official to implicate U.S. President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. He told the committee about an ‘enemies list’ that the White House kept.

26 Jun 1963 – 60 years ago
U.S. President John F. Kennedy visited West Berlin, West Germany, and made his famous declaration ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (I am a Berliner) to demonstrate the USA’s support.

27 Jun 2003 – 20 years ago
The USA’s National Do Not Call Registry was launched. It allowed residential phone users to opt out of receiving telemarketing calls.

28 Jun 1973 – 50 years ago
Elections were held for the Northern Ireland Assembly. It began operating on 1st January 1974, but collapsed in May.
It was re-established in 1998 but collapsed again in 2017. The current Assembly was established in 2020.

29 Jun 1933 – 90 years ago
Death of Fatty Arbuckle, American actor, comedian and film director.

30 Jun 1948 – 75 years ago
The invention of the transistor was officially announced.
It was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at the Bell Telephone Laboratory in Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA in December 1947.
They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.

More anniversaries:

You’ll find hundreds more anniversaries for this month in The Date-A-Base Book 2023. The 2024, 2025 and 2026 and 2027 editions are also available if you work further ahead. The 2028 edition will be available from April 2023. Find out more at ideas4writers.com.

How to use the anniversaries:

If you’d like to know more about how to turn the anniversaries listed here and in The Date-A-Base Books into articles for magazines and newspapers, take a look at our free 68-page guide, Ditch Your Day Job: the easiest way to make a living (or earn some extra cash) as a writer.

It has some terrific bonuses too, including a complete month of anniversaries from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, 301 article-writing ideas and tips, plus a 25 percent discount when you buy two or more editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

Share this:

31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in May 2023

31 newsworthy historical anniversaries in May 2023

Posted on by admin

Here are 31 newsworthy and notable historical anniversaries in May 2023
(listed six months in advance so you have time to write about them)

Historical anniversaries are great for “On This Day in History” features, articles, biographies and other anniversary tie-ins. They’re popular with newspaper and magazine readers and radio stations, and editors, producers and presenters love them. They’re easy to research too. You can also turn them into films, documentaries, novels, use them to plan events and exhibitions, and much more. (Find out more at the end of this article.)

We’ve randomly picked one anniversary for each day of the month from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, which lists more than 3,000 anniversaries.

1 May 1873 – 150 years ago
Death of David Livingstone, Scottish missionary and explorer. Best known for his search for the sources of the Nile, and for going missing (and being found) in Africa.

2 May 1933 – 90 years ago
The first modern sighting of Scotland’s Loch Ness monster was reported in the Inverness Courier.

3 May 1923 – 100 years ago
U.S. Army Air Service Lieutenants Oakley G. Kelly and John Arthur Macready made the first non-stop coast-to-coast flight across the USA. They flew from New York to San Diego in 26 hours and 50 minutes.

4 May 2003 – 20 years ago
The first member of the horse family to be cloned: a mule named Idaho Gem was born at the University of Idaho, USA.

5 May 1948 – 75 years ago
The Organization of American States was officially founded.

6 May 1953 – 70 years ago
The first successful open-heart surgery on a human, using a heart-lung machine, was performed by John Gibbon in Pennsylvania, USA.

7 May 1963 – 60 years ago
The USA launched the Telstar 2 communications satellite. It transmitted the first colour transatlantic television broadcasts. It was shielded against the radiation that had damaged its predecessor, Telstar 1.

8 May 1933 – 90 years ago
Polythene was discovered (by accident) by chemists Reginald Gibson and Eric Fawcett at ICI in Wallerscote, Cheshire, UK.

9 May 1873 – 150 years ago
Birth of Anton Cermak, Mayor of Chicago (1931–33).
(Shot in 1933 during an assassination attempt on U.S. President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. He died three weeks later – but most likely from ulcerative colitis rather than the wound.)

10 May 1933 – 90 years ago
The Nazis staged massive public burnings of ‘un-German’ books outside Berlin University.

11 May 1998 – 25 years ago
India exploded three atomic bombs underground – its first nuclear tests for 24 years – violating a global ban on testing and shocking the world. It carried out a second round of tests on 13th May. In response, Pakistan exploded five underground nuclear bombs on 28th May.

12 to 25 May 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II: the Trident Conference (also called the Third Washington Conference) took place in the USA. Delegations led by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt made plans for the next phase of the war. Topics included planning for the Allied invasion of Sicily, setting the date of the Normandy Landings (Operation Overlord/D-Day – 1st May 1944 but later delayed to 6th June), and the progress of the Pacific Campaign.

13 May 1973 – 50 years ago
The first Battle of the Sexes tennis match: Bobby Riggs v. Margaret Court, in Ramona, California, USA. Riggs won the two-set exhibition match.
(On 20th September 1973 Riggs played Billie Jean King in the three-set Battle of the Sexes II. King won.
In 1992, Jimmy Connors played Martina Navratilova in the Battle of the Sexes III. Connors won.)

14 May 1973 – 50 years ago
NASA launched Skylab – the USA’s first manned space station. The first manned mission launched on 25th May, and included three space walks to repair damage that Skylab suffered during launch.

15 May 1948 – 75 years ago
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War began when the Arab states of Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq invaded Israel in support of the Palestinians.
Saudi Arabia joined the invasion on 18th May.

16 to 17 May 1943 – 80 years ago
World War II – the Dambusters Raid.
Britain’s RAF launched Operation Chastise, deploying bouncing bombs (invented by Barnes Wallace) to bypass anti-torpedo nets and breach dams, causing catastrophic flooding in Germany’s Ruhr Valley.

17 May 1973 – 50 years ago
The Watergate hearings began in the U.S. Senate, and were televised nationally.

18 May 1958 – 65 years ago
Italian racing driver Maria Teresa de Filippis became the first woman to compete in a Formula One Grand Prix.

19 May 1898 – 125 years ago
Death of William Ewart Gladstone, British Prime Minister (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, 1892–94).

20 May 1873 – 150 years ago
American businessman Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis were granted a U.S. patent for blue jeans.

21 May 1898 – 125 years ago
Birth of Armand Hammer, American business magnate and art collector. Best known as the chairman of Occidental Petroleum (1957–90). He was also known for his close ties with the Soviet Union and for advocating citizen diplomacy.

22 May 1923 – 100 years ago
Stanley Baldwin became British Prime Minister after Bonar Law was diagnosed with terminal cancer and immediately retired.

23 May 1873 – 150 years ago
The North-West Mounted Police was founded in Canada. It became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1920.

24 May 1948 – 75 years ago
Benjamin Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera was performed for the first time, in Cambridge, England.

25 May 1973 – 50 years ago
The album Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield was released. It was the first album released by Virgin Records.

26 to 27 May 1923 – 100 years ago
The first Le Mans 24 hours endurance motor race was held.

27 May 2003 – 20 years ago
WordPress, the blogging/content management system, was released.

28 May 1993 – 30 years ago
British nurse Beverley Allitt was convicted of killing four children and attacking nine others between February and April 1991 in the children’s ward at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire. She was sentenced to 13 concurrent life sentences in a secure hospital and is unlikely to be released.

29 May 1953 – 70 years ago
New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

30 May 1848 – 175 years ago
The Mexican–American War officially ended when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo came into effect.

31 May 1898 – 125 years ago
Birth of Norman Vincent Peale, American clergyman, writer, speaker, and advocate of positive thinking.
Best known for his book The Power of Positive Thinking.

More anniversaries:

You’ll find hundreds more anniversaries for this month in The Date-A-Base Book 2023. The 2024, 2025 and 2026 and 2027 editions are also available if you work further ahead. The 2028 edition will be available from April 2023. Find out more at ideas4writers.com.

How to use the anniversaries:

If you’d like to know more about how to turn the anniversaries listed here and in The Date-A-Base Books into articles for magazines and newspapers, take a look at our free 68-page guide, Ditch Your Day Job: the easiest way to make a living (or earn some extra cash) as a writer.

It has some terrific bonuses too, including a complete month of anniversaries from The Date-A-Base Book 2023, 301 article-writing ideas and tips, plus a 25 percent discount when you buy two or more editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

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How We Create The Date-A-Base Book

How We Create The Date-A-Base Book

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You might be wondering how we create The Date-A-Base Book series. It’s a heck of a lot of work, as you’ll see below. But it’s great fun, we learn a lot, and we’ve been doing it for twenty years now, so we’ve got the process pretty well nailed down. But, as you’ll also see, there’s still plenty of room for improvement – when the technology allows.

Step 1: Data collection

We create the books in a five-year cycle, as we’ll explain below.

Every five years we visit fifteen or so websites that list historical anniversaries, including Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, History.com, and several more. None of them are as accurate as we would like, but we deal with that later. We copy the information we need from each site and paste it into a massive text file.

Processing time: about a month.

Step 2: Data processing

The anniversaries are in different date formats, and they all need to be the same. So we do lots of searching, replacing, sorting and manual corrections to fix it.

We then run the file through a piece of software (written by Dave) that:

  • splits the dates into day, month, and year
  • sorts them into years ending 0 and 5, 1 and 6, 2 and 7, 3 and 8, and 4 and 9
  • puts these years into five separate text files

This gives us the raw data for the next five editions of The Date-A-Base Book.

We import the five text files into Microsoft Excel and insert two new columns: the year we’re interested in (for example 2024) and the anniversary (2024 minus the year of the event). We then sort the spreadsheet by anniversary, month, and day of the month.

At this stage we usually have around 36,000 entries for each month.

Processing time: another month.

Step 3: Delete if not a significant year

We now delete the anniversaries we aren’t interested in. For example, we keep the 70th, 75th and 80th anniversaries, but delete the 71st – 74th and the 76th – 79th.

Processing time: one day.

Step 4: Delete the duplicates

Many of the websites we harvested the anniversaries from list the same anniversaries, and we only need them once. So we go through them one by one and delete the duplicates.

Processing time: one week for each of the five files, or about a month in total.

Step 5. Delete if not notable

This is where we put our general knowledge and memories to good use. We have to decide whether each anniversary is newsworthy and notable enough to be included in the book. We go through them several times, using the following criteria, gradually whittling them down:

  • Have we heard of the person or event?
  • Is there an entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica, or an image and a comprehensive entry in Wikipedia?
  • Do we think the person or event is important enough to include in the book?

By the end, around 4,000 anniversaries will remain, but we’ll lose several hundred of them in the next stage.

Processing time: one month for each edition.

Step 6: Cross-checking

After importing the file into Microsoft Word, we go through each anniversary in detail. We check it in Encyclopaedia Britannica again, and on any official websites we can find. We also follow the references in Wikipedia, and make heavy use of Google.

Where there is any disagreement (which there frequently is) we search for obituaries, photos of graves, birth certificates, patent applications, official plaques, and so on.

Quite often, we find that the date given for an anniversary is wrong. Sometimes we can simply correct it or move it to a different month. But hundreds of them will be so completely wrong that they have to be removed.

If we can’t find any official confirmation of the dates or facts, we have to decide whether to include it in the book with a question mark or footnote, or delete it.

As each anniversary is confirmed, we rewrite the description to make it as clear as possible and to conform to our style guide.

We’ll end up with around 3,000 anniversaries that will appear in the book.

Processing time: two to three months for each edition.

Step 7: Layout 1

The Date-A-Base Book is laid out in a grid format, with columns for the anniversary, the date, and the description.

The grid is created in Serif PagePlus X9 (which has been discontinued). We’re hoping to migrate to Affinity Publisher soon, but it doesn’t yet have the Book Plus feature we need.

This stage simply involves lots of copying and pasting.

We also update the title pages and Introduction in each edition, and check that the Table of Contents shows the correct page numbers.

Processing time: about a week.

Step 8: Proofreading

We print a copy of the book and go through it with a red pen, checking date formats, spellings, hyphenation, line breaks, superscripts, and so on. We then make the corrections in PagePlus.

Processing time: about a week.

Step 9: Layout 2

We surveyed readers of The Date-A-Base Book a few years ago and asked which format they preferred – chronological or sorted by date. Half said they wanted chronological and half said they wanted sorted by date. So we publish both versions every year.

For this stage, we go through the chronological version and pick out all the anniversaries dated 1st January and move them to Page 1. Then we go through the anniversaries again, pick out the 2nd January anniversaries and put them after the 1st January entries. And so on for every day of the year. We haven’t found an automated way of doing it (yet).

After a quick proofread to check the line breaks, word wrapping and hyphenation, the British edition is finished.

Processing time: about a week.

Step 10: The USA edition

We surveyed our American readers a few years ago, asking if they were happy to receive the British version. No, they were not. So we create versions for them too.

First, we take the British chronological version, change the Page Size from A4 to Letter, and alter the margins and headers.

We haven’t found any shortcut way of changing the date format from British to American (and believe me we’ve tried) so we have to change them all manually.

Then we change the spellings and punctuation in the descriptions, update the Table of Contents, and give it a brief proofread. The U.S. chronological version is now complete.

We create the U.S. sorted by date version in exactly the same way that we created the British version.

Processing time: two weeks for each edition.

Step 11: The cover

We have a standard cover template, created in Adobe Photoshop, that we use every year.

We change:

  • the year
  • the edition number
  • the number of anniversaries in the book
  • the three images at the bottom of the front cover
  • the spine width – depending on the number of pages

The images illustrate anniversaries from 150, 100, and 50 years ago. We choose anniversaries that are known worldwide, and images that are instantly recognisable (and free to use).

Processing time: about half a day.

Step 12: Publishing

The final step. We create PDF versions of the covers and contents and upload them to Amazon, which prints copies one at a time as customers order them.

We upload the same files to our e-book distributor, Payhip.

Once Amazon has approved the book and given us a link we can send buyers to, we add it to the ideas4writers website.

And then we announce it to the world via our blog, Facebook, Twitter, our mailing list of previous buyers, and so on.

Processing time: two days.

Summary

It takes around seven months to create the first edition in a five-year cycle, and about five months for the following four editions.

We work five years ahead, and as I write this at the end of 2022, we’re about to start work on the 2028 edition, which will be released in the spring of 2023. This will be the fifth and last edition in the current five-year cycle. The 2029 edition will be the first in the next cycle, so we’ll need to start work two months earlier next year.

Although it takes us five to seven months to create each edition, you can buy it for just £12.95 (about $14.99 in the USA).

Here are our current editions.