[One solution to appalling prison conditions is to improve them; an equally elegant solution - don't break the law so you don't have to go to prison and live in appalling conditions - never seems to occur to anyone. Then again, think of the catastrophic effect a law-abiding populace would have on the robber barons who run the prison industry... Some of them might have to turn to a life of crime! Now wouldn't that be a graceful bit of karma in action?]
1739 - A slave uprising, now known as the Stono Rebellion, erupted near Charleston, South Carolina.
1791 - Although the city of Washington, D.C. was founded in July 1790 under the terms of the Residence Act, the selection and surveying of the exact site was left up to country's first President, George Washington, who personally oversaw this endeavour throughout his two terms in office... The city was named after him on this day by the three commissioners (Thomas Johnson, Daniel Carroll, and David Stuart) he'd selected to assist him. Washington left office in March 1797, and died in December 1799 before seeing his plans brought to much fruition.
1850 - California became the 31st state.
1850 - California became the 31st state.
1863 - Having bombarded Chattanooga since August 21st at the outset of the Chickamauga Campaign, John T. Wilder and the Union Army entered the city.
1893 - President Grover Cleveland's wife, First Lady Frances Folsom Cleveland, gave birth to a daughter, Esther, in the White House; not only were the Clevelands the first Presidential couple to be married in the Executive Mansion, Esther (their second child) was the first Presidential child to be born there.
1924 - The Hanapepe Massacre occurred on the Hawai'ian island of Kauai, when police shot and killed 16 Filipino sugar workers for having the temerity to go on strike.
1926 - NBC was founded.
1926 - NBC was founded.
1942 - A Yokosuka E14Y float plane launched from an I-25 Japanese submarine dropped two incendiary bombs on Mount Emily, Oregon; only the area's Lookout Air Raid and favourable weather conditions prevented a major forest fire, which had been the aim of the mission. A second attempt, on September 29th, was similarly unsuccessful; together they represent the sum total of aerial bombardment suffered by the continental United States during World War II. As a testament to the spirit of Oregonians, the float plane's pilot Nobuo Fujita visited the nearest town, Brookings, several times between 1962 and his death in September 1997; in October 1998 his daughter interred some of her father's ashes at the bomb site, which since July 2006 has been on the National Register of Historic Places as the Wheeler Ridge Japanese Bombing Site.
1947 - The first recorded case of a computer bug being found was a moth lodged in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University.
1956 - Elvis Presley made the first of his three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.
1965 - Hurricane Betsy made landfall near New Orleans, Louisiana; 76 died and $1.42 billion in damages were caused. Ironically, this was the same day the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development was established.
1969 - A DC-9, Allegheny Airlines Flight 853, collided with a Piper PA-28 at an altitude of 1082 metres (3,550 feet) and crashed near the Indiana town of Fairland; all passengers and crew on board both planes - 83 in total - died.
1996 - NHL superstar Mario Lemieux signed a 12-month contract with the Pittsburgh Penguins worth $10 million.
2003 - Boston's Roman Catholic Archdiocese agreed to pay $85 million to 552 people in order to settle sex abuse cases brought on by their clergy, but not before the scandal had toppled the city's archbishop, Bernard Francis Law.
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