What Happened Today

When a fire broke out on the ninth floor of the Asch Building in lower Manhattan, the location of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a series of horrible conditions came together to create one of the worst industrial accidents in American history. The Triangle Company employed mostly young, immigrant Jewish and Italian women for very low pay at extremely long hours for low wages. To make sure they would continue working consistently and not take smoke breaks, exits were blocked from the Triangle factory. So when the fire broke out, the real problem was not the fire, but that people could not escape. The elevators were overloaded, then was damaged by the fire. The flimsy fire escape fell under the weight of the people escaping the fire. Most of the deaths actually occurred by people leaping to the sidewalk in order to escape the fire. In the aftermath, the factory owners were found not guilty of criminal charges, but were found responsible in a civil trial. More importantly, vast improvements to working conditions in factories happened through the work of unions as well as politicians.

Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, was killed by a single bullet shot by a gunman while he was saying mass in a small hospital chapel in the middle of San Salvador. The immediate reaction was shock and grief, with 250,000 people mourning at his funeral. Then that was marred by gunfire by a paramilitary group, which caused a massacre of dozens of people. The reason for Romero's assassination was fairly clear, as he had been the most notable and consistent opponent of the right-wing, military-controlled Revolutionary Government of El Salvador. Through his regular weekly radio sermons, Romero advocated for the poor of El Salvador, made the world aware of the government's actions, and read the names of those people killed or disappeared in the Salvadoran Civil War. Despite the obvious cause of Romero's assassination, identifying the actual gunman has been difficult, even if it was clearly orchestrated by Roberto D'Aubuission and government backed death squads. Even though his murderer has never been identified, Romero became a symbol of opposition and the issues in El Salvador.

Elisha Graves Otis did not invent the elevator, which actually date back to antiquity, but invented something much more important, a safety brake. With Otis' invention, an elevator could now be guaranteed not to regularly crash to the floor. At first, people were still uncertain about the design, but through an ingenious demonstration at the 1854 New York World's Fair, Otis proved that his elevators were remarkably safe. Still, only warehouses and large industrial firms wanted Otis' elevators, which make for an extremely limited market for elevators. That would change in 1857 with the installation of an elevator from the Otis Co. in the E.V. Haughwout & Co. store in Lower Manhattan. A brand new Renaissance Revival building for the country's leader in fine cutlery, china, and cut glass, the Haughwout Building soon became famous for its enclosed elevator. After the popularity of this elevator, the Otis Co. was able to sell hundreds and then thousands of elevators to commercial buyers in the next few decades. Not only did this make the Otis Co. a successful company, but it transformed the very nature of urban architecture.

The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in Congress consistently from the 1920s until the early 1970s, but it rarely got anywhere and was never near to becoming part of the United States Constitution. The ERA guaranteed equal rights under the law regardless of sex, which actually meant it created divisions among women's rights advocates as well as seeing opposition from conservatives. Yet by 1971, the Equal Rights Amendment got increasing support thanks to a renewed women's rights movement, and thanks to the efforts of Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan, the Amendment finally passed the House of Representatives by a wide margin in late 1971. Immediately, the Senate also passed the measure by a large margin in March 1972, and the Amendment looked like it would fly through state legislatures and be added to the Consitution. But then a strange thing happened. After half the states had ratified the amendment and more were about to, a movement grew to stop the ERA. Led by Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist, the movement was successful not only in stopping states from ratifying the amendment but also forced some states to rescind their ratification, dooming the Equal Rights Amendment.

Large numbers of people gathered at the police station in Sharpevile, a township south of Johannesburg, to protest the "pass laws" of Apartheid-era South Africa. The idea of such laws was that every black South African had to carry papers everywhere they went, further enshrining the limitations on movement set up under Apartheid. The protest was organized by the Pan Africanist Congress, a splinter group from the African National Congress, who also usurped the planned protest by the ANC by ten whole days. So the people gathered amid unease and unhappiness with a lack of clear leadership in front of the police station. This made the all-white police force panic, which caused them to call in more police with armored personnel carriers and machine guns. After a small tussle, police opened fire on the crowd. In less than one minute, 69 people were fatally shot, while more than one hundred others were injured. The evidence later showed that most of those shot were shot while running away from police. In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre, the anti-Apartheid parties became more willing to use violence, while the government cracked down harder on those parties.

Napoleon Bonaparte was a Corsican from the minor nobility who took advantage of the chaos of the French Revolution and his own prodigious military skill to become the very first Emperor of the French. When he was forced to abdicate in 1814 and the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the person of Louis XVIII, it seemed like Napoleon was done for good. Forced into exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba, Napoleon was in charge of the island's politics with a small military force while the Congress of Vienna saw the great European powers decide how to construct a post-Napoleonic world. Instead, Napoleon got reports of dissatisfaction from France and disagreement from the Congress of Vienna, so he decided to land in the south of France. As he made his way through the Alps and towards Paris, Napoleon gathered larger and larger numbers of troops. As former allies like Marshal Ney were sent to stop him, they instead joined him. So Louis XVIII went into exile for second time. By late March, Napoleon victoriously entered the city of Paris. It appeared he would be returned to being Emperor for good, but he only ruled for a little over a hundred days, until the Battle of Waterloo and his second exile.

The actual championship game of the 1966 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Tournament was not an all-time classic. It was, however, a revolutionary game. At tip-off, Coach Don Haskins rolled out an all African-American starting lineup for the Texas Western College Miners, a feat that was even more significant because they were facing an all-white University of Kentucky Wildcats team. Both teams had lost one game all year, although Kentucky faced a tougher schedule in the regular season and was more impressive than Texas Western in the Tournament to that point. From the beginning, Texas Western was more impressive in the game, with center David Lattin dunking twice early in the game as a point of emphasis. With their win, Texas Western not only became champions, but shattered many of the stereotypes of black players still prevalent in college basketball. After 1966, college coaches throughout the south saw that in order to win they needed black players, and African-Americans began to play in large numbers for the national powers.

When two men dressed in police uniforms asked to be let in to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston at 1:24 AM, the young security guard thought nothing of letting them into the museum. The problem was that they weren't police, but were instead thieves seeking to steal priceless works of art. Immediately, they tied up the two security guards in the basement, then spent well over an hour taking art literally off the walls. In total, they took 13 works of art, subsequently valued at over $500 million. The thieves were clearly not well versed in art or the museum's collection, as they ignored the Museum's most important pieces and physically cut out Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee from its frame, reducing its value. They still managed to take Johannes Vermeer's The Concert, one of a handful of Vermeer works in the world, as well as many other valuable pieces of art. In the immediate aftermath, all leads pursued by the FBI turned out to be useless. Multiple suspects and theories have been put forward, but the missing artwork has never been found. The FBI did claim that they know who did it, but did not release names and said that they were deceased. Every year, the Museum still releases a statement asking for information.

Golda Meir was born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev, raised and educated in Milwaukee, and eventually became the Prime Minister of Israel. A remarkable woman, her life seems highly representative of Israel's founding generation despite her unique accomplishments. Avoiding an early marriage, she fled Milwaukee for Denver to live with her sister and brother-in-law, where she would be introduced to politics, Zionism, and her future husband. After being a teacher in Milwaukee and a leader in Labor Zionist organizations, the now Golda Myerson and her husband went to live on a kibbutz in Israel. Becoming a leader among the labor movement in then-British Palestine, she would then be a leader in the movement to create a State of Israel. At its actual founding, Golda Meir would be one of 24 people that signed the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Later, she would become a member of the Knesset for the left wing Mapai party, and rose to become Foreign Minister in the 1960s, when she would Hebraicize her name to Golda Meir. It appeared she was taking a step back in the late 1960s after being diagnosed with lymphoma. However, after the sudden death of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Meir was selected as the new leader of the government.

The Football Association Challenge Cup was the first attempt to have a competition between the member clubs of the Football Association, which codified a form of football from games played at English public schools in the previous decade. Although the FA Cup would become a massive tournament, the first edition reflected the state of the game at the time. Fifteen football clubs participated in total, although the FA had fifty member clubs. Additionally, the bracket was irregular in many ways, as teams who drew automatically went to the next round and some teams got byes and "walkovers," which really meant forfeits due to logistics. By the time the Final arrived in March, the Wanderers were due to face the Royal Engineers at Kennington Oval, better known and better attended as the ground for Surrey County Cricket Club. After fifteen minutes, the Wanderers' Morton Betts, using the pseudonym "A.H. Chequer," scored the game's first goal, which would stand as the only goal, giving Wanderers the victory. That would be the very first FA Cup championship.