If there are two things Americans love deeply, it’s cars and movies. On June 6, 1933, Richard Hollingshead opened the first official drive-in movie theater in Camden, New Jersey. Patrons paid a quarter to see the British comedy Wives Beware from the comfort of their automobiles. …
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In a quiet but fateful moment on June 5, 1851, the abolitionist newspaper The National Era published the first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, a serialized novel by a relatively unknown New England woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe. The…
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On June 5, 1947, United States Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivered a speech at Harvard University that shaped the course of modern history. He proposed a comprehensive aid program to help Europe recover from the devastation of World War II. This address…
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June 5, 1956, was a day that changed Rock and Roll forever. On the Milton Berle Show, a young musician named Elvis Presley scandalized the country on national television. Elvis’s performance included exaggerated gyrations that drove the girls in the audience wild, and enraged…
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On June 4, 1919, the United States Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, formally initiating the final phase of a political struggle that had spanned more than seven decades. With the stroke of a legislative pen, Congress did not merely advance a…
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On June 4, 1876, The Transcontinental Express, also called “The Lightning Express,” made history and it puttered into San Francisco a mere 83 hours or so after it had left New York City. “That any human being could travel across the entire nation in less than four…
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On June 4, 1896, in the early hours of the morning, Henry Ford took his first significant step towards revolutionizing personal transportation by test-driving his pioneering invention, the Ford Quadricycle. This event marked a pivotal moment not only in Ford’s life but also in…
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On June 3, 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia—ragged, proud, and buoyed by recent triumph—began its long march out of war-ravaged Virginia and into the lush, unbloodied countryside of Pennsylvania. At its head rode General Robert E. Lee, whose strategic genius and battlefield audacity…
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The French Revolution crossed a fatal threshold on June 2, 1793, when François Hanriot, a failed clerk turned militant commander of the Paris National Guard, surrounded the National Convention at cannon-point and arrested 22 leading Girondist deputies—on orders not of the people, but of…
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On June 3, 1937, the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, married Wallis Simpson, an American socialite. This event, held at the Château de Candé in Monts, France, changed the direction of the British monarchy forever. Edward VIII had…
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