19731776 Club

Nixon rejects the court order; he offers a senator's summary instead of the tapes

Archibald Cox has three days to accept Stennis's word for what's on the recordings, or else.

A federal appeals court had just ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes to Special Counsel Archibald Cox. On October 19, 1973, Nixon refused to comply outright and offered a workaround instead: Senator John C. Stennis, a deaf, 72-year-old Mississippi Democrat trusted by both parties, would listen to the tapes himself and write up a summary for Cox's office. Nixon would keep the actual recordings. Cox had until the following Tuesday to accept the deal…

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Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown; he sends a stand-in rather than face Washington

Eight thousand British and German troops lay down arms as a band reportedly played "The World Turned Upside Down."

1950

Pyongyang falls to UN troops; by nightfall, China's army is already crossing the border

Church bells rang over the North Korean capital hours before Beijing's soldiers began wading the Yalu.

1948

Truman stands on Union Square to honor three presidents North Carolina gave the nation

A sitting president stood before bronze and granite to mark where Jackson, Johnson and Polk were born.

19871776 Club

Three days after a Silkworm missile blinded an American tanker captain, Reagan sends four destroyers to answer.

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U.S. detonates Ivy Mike at Enewetak; Elugelab Island is gone

The 7:15 a.m. shot, fired just before a presidential election, yields 10.4 megatons from a device more than twenty feet tall.

1983

Reagan signs the King holiday bill, fifteen years after the first one was introduced

Congress passed it by wide margins, but the President had once dismissed the push behind it as "an image, not reality."

1988

A Cornell graduate student's program slips onto the Internet from a computer at MIT

Robert Tappan Morris, 23, launches it at about 8:30 p.m. from another campus so it won't trace back to Cornell; the network holds roughly 60,000 machines.

1948

The Tribune's early edition crowns Dewey; the returns say otherwise

A printers' strike pushed the press deadline hours earlier, and about 150,000 copies roll before the count turns.

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