This Day in History Class

On this day in 1867, the U.S. Congress passed the District of Columbia Suffrage Bill, granting African American men the right to vote for the first time in the nation’s history.

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On this day in 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei made the first recorded sighting of the planet Jupiter’s moons.

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On this day in 1907, Dr. Maria Montessori opened a new kind of school in an impoverished neighborhood in Rome.

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On this day in 1980, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang became the first hip hop song ever to break into the Billboard Top 40.

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On this day in 1990, an overcrowded passenger train slammed into a parked freight train at a railway station in the Sindh province of Pakistan.

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On this day in 1946, William Joyce, better known to the British as Lord Haw-Haw, was put to death for betraying his country on behalf of Nazi Germany.

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On this day in 1974, President Richard Nixon established a maximum speed limit of 55 miles per hour on every highway in the United States.

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On this day in 1959, musician Johnny Cash rang in the new year by performing live at San Quentin State Prison in California.

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On this day in 1853, natural history artist and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins hosted a New Year’s Eve dinner party inside a full-scale model of an Iguanodon.

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On this day in 1986, a British mining tradition came to an end when legislation officially ordered that all live canaries be released from the nation’s coal mines.

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