This Day…

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.

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