Aug. 14
Today in history
Today is Aug. 14. On this date in:
1784: Seeking a base in the Aleutian Islands, Russian forces led by fur trader Grigory Shelikhov opened fire on Sitkalidak Island’s Aleut and Alutiiq residents. They killed an estimated one-quarter of the villagers and established Three Saints Bay, the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska.
1820: Two doctors who had studied eye care in England opened the New York Eye Infirmary, the country’s first eye hospital, in two rooms in New York City. The charitable institution cared for the city’s poor and soon performed the first successful pediatric cataract surgeries in the United States.
1848: Congress created the Oregon Territory, an area covering not only present-day Oregon but Idaho,
Washington and parts of western Montana and Wyoming. It was sparsely populated, with fewer than 13,000 residents in the 1850 census.
1862: President Abraham Lincoln invited five Black men for a policy discussion, the first time a president had done so. He said Black people would never be equal in the United States and urged his guests to rally support for emigration to Liberia or Panama, offering government funds to do so. Northern newspaper editors and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass were furious.
1894: Physics professor Oliver Lodge gave one of the earliest public demonstrations of wireless communication at Oxford University, sending a message in Morse code about 180 feet from his lab to the Oxford Museum.
1911: Ethel Payne, called the “First Lady of the Black Press,” was born in Chicago. She spent decades covering civil rights issues, starting with the poor treatment of Black U.S. troops in World War II, and was the first Black woman to serve as a radio and television commentator at a national news organization.
1917: With World War I entering its fourth year, China abandoned its neutrality and declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. Its primary goal was to earn a place at the bargaining table and regain control of the Shandong Peninsula after its rival, Japan, captured a major German base there.
1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. It established a permanent national pension system for unemployed people and retirees based on employer and worker contributions, as well as benefits for people with disabilities and widows with children.
1953: Trying to create a ball that would be easy to throw with a curve and not break windows, David N. Mullany and his 13-year-old son David A. Mullany created the first successful prototype of the Wiffle Ball. “Whiff” came from the slang for a strikeout.
1965: The Beatles taped their final “Ed Sullivan Show” appearance, playing six songs the night before a big concert at New York’s Shea Stadium. The show aired the performance almost a month later.
1988: Italian race car driver, designer and automobile manufacturer Enzo Ferrari died at 90. His individually made, powerful cars became status symbols within a decade of their introduction in 1947.
– USA TODAY Network
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Today in history, August 14
