This Week in History
by Dianne Hermann
“The secret to happiness is freedom.
The secret to freedom is courage.” Carrie Jones
Aug. 11-17, 2025
August 11
1919 – The Green Bay Packers football team is founded by George Calhoun and Earl “Curly” Lambeau and is named after its sponsor, the Indian Packing Company. Lanbeau was the first Packers coach. The Packers won the first Super Bowl on January 15, 1967, in Los Angeles against the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10. They went on to win three more Super Bowls in 1968, 1997, and 2011.
1934 – The first federal prisoners arrive at Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay in California. Sixty special FBI agents, U.S. Marshals, and railway security officials escort the 137 handcuffed prisoners to The Rock. Alcatraz closed as a prison in 1963 and is now open to tourists. Watch a brief history of Alcatraz.
1965 – The Watts Riots in Los Angeles begin and lasts for six days. A black motorist, Marquette Frye, on parole for robbery was pulled over by police for reckless driving. A fight ensued and Frye was arrested for drunk driving. The riots resulted in 34 deaths and over $40 million in property damage. The National Guard was called in and helped suppress the riots.
1992 – The Mall of America opens in Bloomington, Minnesota, as the largest shopping mall in the U.S. It has almost 3 million square feet of retail space. It averages 40 million visitors annually, roughly eight times the population of Minnesota.
2008 – Airbnb, an online vacation rental marketplace, is founded in San Francisco.
August 12
1620 – The ships Mayflower and Speedwell arrive in Dartmouth, England, to repair leaks in the Speedwell. On September 6th the Mayflower headed for America alone when the Speedwell’s leaks could not be fixed. There is no record of the Speedwell ever setting sail again. The Mayflower voyage took 66 days.
1908 – Ford builds the first Model T automobile in Detroit, Michigan. It sold for $825. The last Model T was built in 1927. About 15 million “Tin Lizzies” were built.
1935 – George Herman “Babe” Ruth plays his final baseball game at Fenway Park with 41,766 fans in attendance. Ruth played for 22 season as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and outfielder for the New York Yankees. Ruth, who was diagnosed with cancer in 1946, died 1948 at age 53. He was one of the first patients treated with experimental drugs and radiation treatments simultaneously.
1970 – St. Louis Cardinal’s outfielder Curt Flood loses his antitrust lawsuit against baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn following a 5-3 Supreme Court decision (Flood v. Kuhn). He claimed baseball effectively bound a player and his contract to a team for life. In December 1975, baseball players finally won the right to free agency. Pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter signed the first free-agent contract.
1981 – IBM unveils its first PC (personal computer). It sold for $1,565. Watch an early IBM commercial.
2013 – According to a U.S. Treasury report, only 65 percent of the nearly $80 billion that President Obama unilaterally diverted from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to bail out the auto industry had been recovered. Congress excluded the auto industry from the TARP bill in 2008.
August 13
1889 – William Gray patents the coin-operated telephone. He installed the first phone at a bank in Hartford, Connecticut, as a post-pay phone. The first pre-pay phone was installed in Chicago in 1898. By 1902, there were 81,000 pay telephones in use in the U.S. At the peak in 1995, there were 2.6 million payphones in the U.S. There are currently an estimated 100,000 pay phones in the U.S., with about one-fifth located in New York.
1919 – The racehorse Man o’ War suffers the only defeat of his career by the ironically named horse Upset at Saratoga, New York. Man o’ War retired to stud in 1920 and foaled many champions, including the 1937 Triple Crown winner War Admiral. Watch Man o’ War in a 1920 match race against Sir Barton with actual race footage.
1939 – The passenger train “City of San Francisco” derails and falls into the Humboldt River in Elko, Nevada, killing 24 and injuring 121 passengers and crew. Sabotage was found to be the cause of the crash when the investigation showed the tracks were moved and the track circuits were bypassed. No one was ever arrested, in spite of a $10,000 reward, and the case remains unsolved.
1993 – The District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals rules, subsequent to Armstrong v. The Executive Office following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, that the White House, specifically, and government agencies, in general, must preserve all their e-mail messages under the Federal Records Act (FRA) of 1950 since they are deemed official records. In 1989, Scott Armstrong, executive director of the National Security Archive, filed a FOIA request for the contents of the White House electronic mail and records system to be reviewed before disposition. Armstrong sought and received an injunction prohibiting the destruction of backup tapes after repeated attempts to secure the records failed.
2016 – Michael Phelps closes his Rio Olympics swimming career with a record 23 gold medals.
August 14
1911 – Senate leaders begin rotating the office of President pro tempore of the Senate among leading candidates to fill the vacancy left by the death William P. Frye.
1935 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law, creating unemployment insurance and pension plans for senior citizens.
1941 – President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issue the joint declaration that later becomes known as the Atlantic Charter. Although not a treaty, it was an affirmation “of certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they based their hopes for a better future for the world.” Watch a Discovery video with actual footage.
1945 – In what is called V-J Day, Japan surrenders unconditionally to end World War II after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6th and 9th respectively.
1966 – The first U.S. lunar spacecraft, Lunar Orbiter 1, begins orbiting the Moon. It crashed on the far side of the moon on October 29th after 577 moon orbits.
1974 – Congress authorizes U.S. citizens to own gold again. The Gold Reserve Act of January 1934 outlawed most private possession of gold.
2015 – Patrick Hardison receives the most extensive full face transplant surgery ever performed. The surgery was done by Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez at New York University Langone Medical Center. Hardison was a volunteer firefighter who was severely burned in a 2001 fire. Watch a graphic documentary by the Medical Center.
August 15
1635 – The first recorded hurricane in the U.S. hits the Plymouth Colony.
1824 – Freed American slaves form the country of Christopolis in Africa. The settlement was renamed Monrovia after the American president James Monroe. It claimed its independence in 1847. The colony, now formally called Liberia, is the oldest democratic republic in Africa.
1914 – The Panama Canal opens to trans-oceanic traffic. Work began on the canal in 1904. The grand opening procession that was planned was cancelled after the outbreak of World War I. In 1977, President Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty, which returned control of the canal to Panama in 1999.
1969 – Woodstock Music & Art Fair opens in New York State on Max Yasgur’s 600-acre Dairy Farm. Thirty-two musical acts performed at the outdoor concert. An estimated 400,000 people attended the 3-day event. (Woodstock 50, scheduled for 2019, was cancelled due to permit issues, venue relocations, and artist cancellations.) Watch Max welcome the crowd.
1970 – Patricia Palinkas becomes the first woman professional football player. She was the holder for the Orlando Panthers in the Atlantic Coast Football League. Palinkas is now 82 years old.
1995 – Shannon Faulkner becomes the first female cadet in the history of The Citadel, South Carolina’s state military college, when she won her battle for admission in a Supreme Court decision. She quit the school after five days. The Citadel dropped its gender requirements for admission in July 1996 and admitted four women in August 1996. Watch her interview with Oprah then and now.
2017 – A tweet by former president Obama becomes the most liked tweet in history. He tweeted, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion.”
August 16
1829 – Conjoined twin brothers Chang and Eng Bunker of Siam arrive in Boston to be exhibited in the circus. The Siamese twins married two sisters in 1843 and had 21 children between them. The twins died on the same day in 1874 at age 62.
1863 – President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation.
1920 – Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians is hit in the head by a pitch from New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays. Chapman died the next day and is the only major league baseball player fatality.
1949 – During the Truman Administration, U.S. General Omar Bradley becomes the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On September 22, 1950, Congress officially promoted Bradley to General of the Army with five stars. He was the last officer promoted to that rank, and the only one since World War II.
1960 – Joseph Kittinger, Jr. sets the free-fall world record from 19 ½ miles. He fell more than 16 miles (over 102,000 feet) before opening his parachute over New Mexico. In 2012, Kittinger served as the capsule communicator for Felix Baumgartner’s record-setting free-fall from 24 miles. Kittinger died in 2022 at age 94. Watch a news report of Kittinger jump.
2003 – Representative Bill Janklow (R-SD) runs a stop sign and hits and kills a motorcyclist at a rural intersection near Trent, South Dakota. He was eventually convicted of manslaughter and resigned from Congress in January 2004. Janklow died of brain cancer in 2012 at age 72.
August 17
1859 – The first airmail flight takes off from Lafayette, Indiana, in a hot air balloon.
1903 – Journalist and publisher Joseph Pulitzer donates $1 million to Columbia University to begin the Pulitzer Prizes. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917 to Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World newspaper for his articles entitled “Inside the German Empire” and the biography Julia Ward Howe by Laura E. Richards and Maude Howe Elliott. The New York Tribune received an award for an editorial on the first anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania.
1945 – At the end of World War II North and South Korea are divided along the 38th parallel, also known as the DMZ, or demilitarized zone. The U.S. occupied the area south of the 150-mile-long 38th parallel and the Soviet Union occupied the area north of the parallel.
1960 – The U-2 spy trial of downed American pilot Francis Gary Powers begins in Moscow. Powers pleaded guilty to espionage and was sentenced to three years in prison and seven years hard labor. He served 21 months and was exchanged for convicted KGB spy Rudolph Abel in February 1962, who served 4 years of his 45-year sentence. Watch a report including interviews with Powers.
1992 – Actor Woody Allen admits to being romantically involved with 21-year-old Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow, who is Allen’s longtime companion. Allen and Previn were married in 1997 and are still married. Allen is now 89 and Previn is 54 years old.
1996 – Ross Perot is announced as the Reform Party’s first-ever presidential candidate. He garnered 19 percent of the popular vote in the November election. Perot died in 2019 at age 89.
1998 – President Bill Clinton admits in taped testimony that he had an “improper physical relationship” with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. He admitted before the nation that he “misled people” about his relationship with her. Watch Clinton’s public mea culpa.
2017 – The US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) witnesses the first collision of two neutron stars.
Image from: mercurynews.com
