This Day…

1908 – Orville Wright makes 1st 1-hr airplane flight, Fort Myer, Virginia

1860 – American social reformer and pacifist Jane Addams, cowinner (with Nicholas Murray Butler) of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931, was born.

1945 – V-J Day, formal surrender of Japan signed aboard the USS Missouri, marks the end of World War II

1929 – Aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh makes her first solo flight

1920 – Ethelda Bleibtrey leads an American medal sweep of the Antwerp Olympic women’s 300m freestyle with a world record swim of 4:34.0

1873 – First free kindergarten in the U.S. started by Susan Blow in Carondelet, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri

1889 – 1st ship-to-shore wireless message (“Sherman is sighted”) received in the US from Lightship No. 70 to a coastal receiving station at Cliff House in San Francisco

1848 – New York Herald is the first major eastern newspaper to report the discovery of gold in California

1896 – Gold first discovered in Klondike, found at Bonanza Creek in the Yukon, Canada by George Carmack