Day 317 - This day in legal and military history

November 13
 
WORLD Kindness Day
 
WORLD Orphans Day
 
NATIONAL Caregiver Appreciation Day
 
NATIONAL Sadie Hawkins Day
 

Today in legal and military [and occasional oddities] history
 
1806 Pike’s Peak was discovered by Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike during an expedition to locate the source of the Mississippi River
 
1830 Publication of Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem "Old Ironsides" which saved the famed frigate from the scrap heap
 
1835 Texas officially proclaims its independence from Mexico and calls itself the Lone Star Republic until its admission to the Union in 1845
 
1851 The London-to-Paris telegraph begins operation
 
1862 Lewis Carroll writes in his diary, “Began writing the fairy-tale of Alice – I hope to finish it by Christmas”
 
1907 Paul Corno makes the first helicopter flight
 
1914 The brassiere, invented by Caresse Crosby, is patented
 
1927 New York’s Holland Tunnel officially opens for traffic
 
1940 The US Supreme Court rules in Hansberry v. Lee that African-Americans cannot be barred from white neighborhoods
 
1940 Walt Disney's Fantasia debuted
 
1941 The New York City public schools hold a practice air raid drill and 1.1 million children take part
 
1952 Harvard’s Paul Zoll becomes the first man to use electric shock to treat cardiac arrest
 
1956 The US Supreme Court unanimously strikes down two Alabama laws requiring racial segregation on public buses
 
1970 Powerful tropical cyclone Bhola strikes the Ganges Delta region of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), causing an estimated half-million deaths in a single night, the worst natural disaster of the 20th century
 
1971 The US space probe Mariner 9 went into orbit around Mars
 
1982 The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington, DC
 
1985 23,000 people die when the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupts, melting a glacier and causing a massive mudslide that buries Armero, Columbia

September 1985

Late November 1985

Armero, December 1985