Today in 1912, the Girl Guides (aka the Girl Scouts) was formed in Savannah, Georgia by Juliette Gordon Low.
Today in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt conducted his first "fireside chat."
Today in 1969, the Apollo Nine astronauts splashed down, ending a mission that included the successful testing of the Lunar Module.
Today in 1980, a jury found John Wayne Gacy guilty of murdering 33 in Chicago. It took them less then two-hours to come to the decision, which resulted in his receiving the death penalty.
Today in 1989, the World Wide Web was first proposed by Tim Berners-Lee. While we use the terms “Internet” and “web” interchangeably, they actually refer to different things. The Internet is the global network of computers that are able to communicate with one another (and it actually dates back to the military’s ARPANET, which was first developed in the 60s). The web? That’s the public’s main way of accessing the network.
Today in 2006, construction began on the memorial and museum to commemorate the victims of the 9/11 attacks. The site now features two reflecting pools surrounded by trees where the towers once stood with 2,900 names of people who died there.
Today in 2009, the Obama administration announced it would abandon the Bush administration’s term of ‘enemy combatant’ for the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
Today in 2011, a reactor at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melted down and exploded, releasing radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after Japan's 9.0-magnitude earthquake.
Today in 2014, eight people were killed, 70 were injured, and two buildings were leveled by a gas explosion in East Harlem, New York.