TODAY IN HISTORY

THURSDAY OCT 28, 2021

1886

The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France, was dedicated in New York Harbor by President Grover Cleveland.

1636

The General Court of Massachusetts passed a legislative act establishing Harvard College.

1858

Rowland Hussey Macy opened his first New York store at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan.

1914

Medical researcher Jonas Salk, who developed the first successful polio vaccine, was born in New York.

1922

Fascism came to Italy as Benito Mussolini took control of the government.

1962

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev informed the United States that he had ordered the dismantling of missile bases in Cuba; in return, the U.S. secretly agreed to remove nuclear missiles from U.S. installations in Turkey.

1980

President Jimmy Carter and Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan faced off in a nationally broadcast, 90-minute debate in Cleveland.

1991

What became known as “The Perfect Storm” began forming hundreds of miles east of Nova Scotia; lost at sea during the storm were the six crew members of the Andrea Gail, a swordfishing boat from Gloucester, Massachusetts.

1996

Richard Jewell, cleared of committing the Olympic park bombing, held a news conference in Atlanta in which he thanked his mother for standing by him and lashed out at reporters and investigators who’d depicted him as the bomber, who turned out to be Eric Rudolph.

2001

The families of people killed in the September 11terrorist attack gathered in New York for a memorial service filled with prayer and song.

2002

American diplomat Laurence Foley was assassinated in front of his house in Amman, Jordan, in the first such attack on a U.S. diplomat in decades. A student flunking out of the University of Arizona nursing school shot three of his professors to death, then killed himself.