This Day…

1868 – “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott is published in America by Roberts Brothers of Boston

1955 – American actor and cultural icon James Dean is killed in a car crash aged 24

1852 – George Aiken’s play “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s famous anti-slavery novel premieres in Troy, New York

1948  –  Mildred Gillars (Axis Sally), an American broadcaster employed by the Third Reich in Nazi Germany to proliferate propaganda during World War II, pleads not guilty to eight chargs of treason in Washington, D.C.

1875 – Billy the Kid is arrested for the 1st time and jailed after receiving clothing stolen from a Chinese laundry. Escapes two days later.

1893 – Cherokee Strip, Oklahoma, opens white settlement homesteaders

1948 – Margaret Chase Smith, American politician (R-Me) elected senator, 1st woman to serve in both houses of US Congress

1850 – Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, whose purity of voice and natural singing style earned her the nickname “the Swedish nightingale,” made her American debut at the Castle Garden Theatre in New York City on September 11, 1850. The appearance inaugurated a ninety-three-stop American tour which was arranged by showman and entertainment entrepreneur Phineas T. Barnum. The tour came on the heels of a fantastically successful string of appearances in England where the large packed-in crowds gave rise to the term, “Jenny Lind crush.”

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.