1791 – The U.S. Congress passed a resolution that created the U.S. Mint.

1803 – The first impeachment trial of a U.S. Judge, John Pickering, began.

1812 – The U.S. Congress passed the first foreign aid bill.

1817 – The first commercial steamboat route from Louisville to New Orleans was opened.

1845 – Florida became the 27th U.S. state.

1845 – The U.S. Congress passed legislation overriding a U.S. President’s veto. It was the first time the Congress had achieved this.

1845 – An Act of Congress established uniform postal rates throughout the nation. The act went into effect on July 1, 1845.

1849 – The U.S. Department of the Interior was established.

1849 – The Gold Coinage Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It allowed the minting of gold coins.

1849 – The U.S. Congress created the territory of Minnesota.

1851 – The U.S. Congress authorized the 3-cent piece. It was the smallest U.S. silver coin.

1857 – Britain and France declared war on China.

1863 – Free city delivery of mail was authorized by the U.S. Postal Service.

1875 – The U.S. Congress authorized the 20-cent piece. It was only used for 3 years.

1878 – Russia and the Ottomans signed the treaty of San Stenafano. The treaty granted independence to Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and the autonomy of Bulgaria.

1885 – The American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) was incorporated in New York as a subsidiary of the American Bell Telephone Company.

1885 – The U.S. Post Office began offering special delivery for first-class mail.

1894 – The “Atlantis” was first published. It was the first Greek newspaper in America.

1900 – Striking miners in Germany returned to work.

1903 – In St. Louis, MO, Barney Gilmore was arrested for spitting.

1903 – The U.S. imposed a $2 head tax on immigrants.

1904 – Wilhelm II of Germany made the first recording of a political document with Thomas Edison’s cylinder.

1905 – The Russian Czar agreed to create an elected assembly.

1906 – A Frenchman tried the first flight in an airplane with tires.

1908 – The U.S. government declared open war on on U.S. anarchists.

1909 – Aviators Herring, Curtiss and Bishop announced that airplanes would be made commercially in the U.S.

1910 – J.D. Rockefeller Jr. announced his withdrawal from business to administer his father’s fortune for an “uplift in humanity”. He also appealed to the U.S. Congress for the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation.

1910 – In New York, Robert Forest founded the National Housing Association to fight deteriorating urban living conditions.

1910 – Nicaraguan rebels admitted defeat in open war and resorted to guerrilla tactics in the hope of U.S. intervention.

1915 – The motion picture “Birth of a Nation” debuted in New York City.

1918 – The Treaty of Brest Litovsky was signed by Germany, Austria and Russia. The treaty ended Russia’s participation in World War I.

1923 – The first issue of Time magazine was published.

1930 – “Flying High” opened at the Apollo Theatre in New York City.

1931 – The “Star Spangled Banner,” written by Francis Scott Key, was adopted as the American national anthem. The song was originally a poem known as “Defense of Fort McHenry.”

1938 – A world record for the indoor mile run was set by Glenn Cunningham. He ran the distance in 4 minutes, 4.4 seconds.

1939 – In Bombay, Ghandi began a fast to protest the state’s autocratic rule.

1941 – Moscow denounced the Axis rule in Bulgaria.

1945 – Superman encountered Batman and Robin for the first time on the Mutual Broadcasting System.

1945 – During World War II, Finland declared war on the Axis.

1952 – “Whispering Streets” debuted on ABC Radio.

1952 – The U.S. Supreme Court upheld New York’s Feinberg Law that banned Communist teachers in the U.S.

1956 – Morocco gained its independence.

1959 – The San Francisco Giants had their new stadium officially named Candlestick Park.

1969 – Apollo 9 was launched by NASA to test a lunar module.

1969 – Sirhan Sirhan testified in a Los Angeles court that he killed Robert Kennedy.

1972 – NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft was launched.

1973 – Japan disclosed its first defense plan since World War II.

1974 – About 350 people died when a Turkish Airlines DC-10 crashed just after takeoff from Orly Airport in Paris.

1978 – The remains of Charles Chaplin were stolen from his grave in Cosier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. The body was recovered 11 weeks later near Lake Geneva.

1980 – The submarine Nautilus was decommissioned. The vessels final voyage had ended on May 26, 1979.

1985 – Women Against Pornography awarded its ‘Pig Award’ to Huggies Diapers. The activists claimed that the TV ads for diapers had “crossed the line between eye-catching and porn.”

1987 – The U.S. House of Representatives rejected a package of $30 million in non-lethal aid for the Nicaraguan Contras.

1991 – 25 people were killed when a United Airlines Boeing 737-200 crashed while on approach to the Colorado Springs airport.

1991 – Rodney King was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers. The scene was captured on amateur video. (California)

1994 – The Mexican government reached a peace agreement with the Chiapas rebels.

1995 – A U.N. peacekeeping mission in Somalia ended. Several gunmen were killed by U.S. Marines in Mogadishu while overseeing the pull out of peacekeepers.

1999 – In Egypt, 19 people were killed when a bus plunged into a Nile canal.

On March 1, 1968, the commission issued its final report.

Government researchers found one common denominator among those most likely to riot: They had experienced or witnessed an act of police brutality.

What causes racial riots?

In recent years, especially following the disturbances that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland following the police-involved deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, pundits and editorial writers have offered many different explanations for what causes riots. Conservatives and most mainstream media outlets often view these disturbances as “riots”—uncontrolled and irrational spasms of reckless violence usually instigated by a handful of unrepresentative malcontents and always the result of a breakdown of respect for authority. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to take a more sympathetic view of the riots and the rioters, blaming the unrest on deep-seated racism and the economic disadvantage that it produced.

The reality, however, is far more complicated and exposes the limits of the conventional wisdom on both sides of the ideological spectrum. In fact, the last time the federal government took a hard look at the causes of urban unrest was in the late 1960s, the most complex findings proved too controversial to be politically palatable. So they were excised from the final report and physically destroyed.

The year was 1967, and the nation had just experienced a series of long hot summers of rioting that culminated with the conflagrations in Newark and Detroit. While the fires were still burning in the latter city, President Lyndon Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, popularly known as the Kerner Commission, to identify the causes of the disturbances and to propose solutions to prevent them from happening again. On March 1, 1968, the commission issued its final report. In stark language the report concluded: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, and one white—separate and unequal.” It placed blame for urban ills on “white racism.” “White institutions” created the ghetto, the report stated, “white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”

On March 1, 1864, Rebecca Lee Crumpler becomes the first African American woman to earn a medical degree. For much of her career she practiced community medicine in Boston, but in the aftermath of the Civil War she traveled south to treat thousands of formerly enslaved refugees. Crumpler wrote one of the first medical manuals by an African American doctor in the United States—and by a woman.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler was born Rebecca Davis in 1831 in Christiana, Delaware. She spent her formative years living in Philadelphia with her aunt, a respected community healer. After moving to Massachusetts and practicing nursing for several years, Rebecca Davis, now Rebecca Lee, applied to the New England Female Medical College in Boston, the first women’s medical school in the nation. The college admitted her in 1860, based on her nursing experience and strong recommendations from doctors familiar with her work. She graduated in 1864 as a “Doctress of Medicine.”

The President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—known as the Kerner Commission—releases its report, condemning racism as the primary cause of the recent surge of riots. Headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, the 11-member commission was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in July 1967 to uncover the causes of urban riots and recommend solutions.

The report, which declared that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” called for expanded aid to African American communities in order to prevent further racial violence and polarization. Unless drastic and costly remedies were undertaken at once, the report said, there would be a “continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.”

The report identified more than 150 riots or major disorders between 1965 and 1968 (including the deadly Newark and Detroit riots) and blamed “white racism” for sparking the violence—not a conspiracy by African American political groups as some claimed.

Statistics for 1967 alone included 83 people killed and 1,800 injured—the majority of them African Americans—and property valued at more than $100 million damaged or destroyed.

For the complete article: history.com