On This Day in History

On this day, October 18th, in 1767, The Mason Dixon Line is drawn. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon complete their survey of the boundary between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland as well as areas […]

British general and playwright John Burgoyne surrenders 5,000 British and Hessian troops to American General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, New York, on this day in 1777. In the summer of 1777, General Burgoyne led an […]

The first public statement against the British Parliament’s Tea Act was a document printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette on this day in 1773. The document became known as the Philadelphia Resolutions. The Tea Act of 1773 was […]

On This Day, October 10th in 1775 General William Howe Named British Commander General William Howe is named the interim commander in chief of the British army in America on this day in 1775, replacing […]

On this day, August 7th,  in 1782, in Newburgh, New York, General George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army, creates the “Badge for Military Merit,” a decoration consisting of a purple heart-shaped […]

On This Day. August 6th, 1945 The United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb, Little Boy,  on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. […]

On This Day, August 5th, 1963, Representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater, or […]

On this day, August 3rd, in 1797, Jeffrey Amherst, who twice refused the position of commander of British forces against the rebelling American patriots, dies at his estate, called Montreal, in England. Amherst is remembered […]

On this day August 1st, in 1774, dissenting British minister Joseph Priestley, author of Observations on Civil Liberty and the Nature and Justice of the War with America, discovers oxygen while serving as a tutor to […]