History Today

"Hello, and welcome to This Day in History brought to you by AARP. Take on today and every day with AARP. Here’s what happened on June 28th. America has long been a nation of car lovers, and the Corvette may just be the most beloved of them all. On this day in 1953, workers at a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, assembled the very first Corvette. It rolled off the assembly line three days later, one of only 300 of the iconic car to be built that year.

Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on June 27th. If you’ve ever visited Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution, you may have wondered just how it got the name “Smithsonian.” It all goes back to this day in 1829, when an English scientist named James Smithson died in Genoa, Italy.

Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on June 26th. If you’re hitting the road on vacation this summer, you’ll likely travel on some of the 41,000 miles of highways built under the Federal Highway Act, which passed Congress on this day in 1956. The bill provided more than $30 billion for what was, at the time, the largest construction project in U.S. history.

Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on June 25th. Amid continuing tensions between the US and North Korea, we look back to this day in 1950, when the Korean War began after North Korean forces invaded South Korea. Soon after, the United States, acting under the auspices of the United Nations, quickly sprang to the defense of South Korea. The two sides struggled through bloody conflict for the next three years. In 1953, the U.S.

Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on June 24th. If you’re one of the half of all Americans who believe that UFOs have visited Earth, then you may have been disappointed on this day in 1997. That’s when the U.S. Air Force released a 231-page report detailing what happened in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Their answer? Nothing. The story goes back to July 1947, when a New Mexico rancher found a strange, shiny material on his land.

"Hello, and welcome to This Day in History brought to you by AARP. Take on today and every day with AARP. Here’s what happened on June 23rd. Just over 50% of the U.S. population is women, but for most of American history, it was mainly men who participated in competitive sports. That all changed after this day in 1972, when Title IX became federal law.

Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on June 22nd. More than 16 million Americans served in World War II, and on this day in 1944, the American government said “thank you” with the signing of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act--better known as the GI Bill. After World War I, returning veterans faced devastating unemployment rates made worse by the Great Depression.

Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on June 21st. Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, which will give you plenty of time to celebrate the anniversary of the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on this day in 1789. The Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, which had governed the new United States since the end of the American Revolution five years earlier.

" Hello, and welcome to This Day in History brought to you by AARP. Take on today and every day with AARP. Here’s what happened on June 20th. If you’ve ever been afraid to go into the water, you might blame JAWS, the iconic film that hit theaters on this day in 1975. The story of a great white shark that terrorizes a New England resort town became an instant blockbuster and the highest-grossing film in movie history until Star Wars premiered two years later.

Hello, and welcome to This Day in History. Here’s what happened on June 19th. With U.S.-Russia relations seemingly always in the news, we look back to this day in 1953, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed. The pair had been convicted of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and were the first U.S. citizens to be convicted and executed for espionage during peacetime.