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19381776 Club

Roosevelt signs the Civil Aeronautics Act; federal hands take the wheel on American skies

The new Civil Aeronautics Authority inherits air traffic control, safety standards, and economic oversight from a patchwork system the airlines themselves had begged Washington to replace.

Through the early 1930s, high-profile crashes had killed prominent Americans and left the public deeply wary of commercial flight — yet the skies remained largely ungoverned. Airlines themselves, organized through the Air Transport Association of America, lobbied Washington for the structure that would restore public confidence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Civil Aeronautics Act in 1938, superseding the aging Watres Act and establishing the Civil Aeronautics Authority to manage air traffic control, safety standards, and economic oversight. The agency would be reorganized in 1940 into two bodies — the Civil Aeronautics Administration and the Civil Aeronautics Board — whose combined grip on American aviation would hold for forty years…

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More from June 23
1972

Nixon tells Haldeman to use the CIA to block the FBI's Watergate inquiry

Six days after the break-in at Democratic headquarters, the Oval Office recording system captures the President invoking national security to shut down investigators.
1961

Twelve nations' Antarctic pact takes force; military operations and nuclear tests are now banned on the continent

The agreement, signed in 1959 after Argentine marines fired on British researchers, designates everything south of 60°S as a scientific preserve open to all signatories.
1972

Nixon signs 37 words into law; no federal program may turn away a student on the basis of sex

Senator Birch Bayh's passage, buried in the Education Amendments of 1972, draws almost no public attention at the signing.
17801776 Club
Continental troops and New Jersey militia blunt both British columns at the Rahway crossings, and the redcoats leave nearly the whole town in ashes as they pull back.
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More from The World Wars
1942

In six minutes of dive-bombing, three Japanese carriers are ablaze; a fourth burns by afternoon

Nimitz, tipped by broken codes, springs an ambush near Midway atoll and the Kidō Butai loses four fleet carriers in a single day.
1944

160,000 troops cross the Channel; Allied forces land on five Normandy beaches under fire

Paratroopers went in past midnight, 5,000 vessels follow at dawn, and by nightfall a contested beachhead holds at a cost of at least 10,000 casualties.
1942

Dive bombers sink three Japanese carriers in six minutes; a fourth falls before dark

Cryptanalysts cracked Tokyo's naval code and fed the enemy a lie about a water shortage, and Nagumo's flight decks are crowded with fueled, armed planes when the Americans arrive.
1935

Dr. Bob Smith takes his last drink, then walks into surgery

The Akron surgeon, sober after hours of talk with New York businessman Bill Wilson, steps into the operating room following a final relapse at an Atlantic City convention.
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