Eighty men, aboard 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers, took part in Doolittle’s 1942 raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942.
Launched from the carrier USS Hornet, the planes bombed five Japanese cities: Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka.
The raid rattled the Japanese and boosted American morale at a time when Japan seemed invincible.
The song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” was written in 1863 during the Civil War by Union army bandmaster Patrick S. Gilmore.
The English explorer Sir Francis Drake gave the name Nova Albion (Latin for “New England”) to California in 1579. The place near San Francisco where he anchored is still called Drake’s Bay.
The worst earthquake east of the Mississippi River occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, on August 31, 1886, and registered what would have been 6.6 on the Richter scale. Sixty people were killed.
Red stands for the blood of the dead. Black represents pride in the color of the skin. Green is for the promise of a new and better life in Africa.
The no-hitter was pitched by Don Larsen of the New York Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the fifth game of the 1956 World Series.
Every soldier defending the fort at the Alamo (about 182 in all) died in the fighting on March 6, 1836, or were killed as prisoners soon after. The dead included Travis, knife-inventor James Bowie, and frontiersman and former U.S. Congressman Davy Crockett.