August 29, 2005 (18 years ago). One of North America's most devastating weather-related disasters begins when the eye of Hurricane Katrina crosses the Louisiana shoreline about 50 miles southeast of downtown New Orleans. Even before the center storm reaches land, some of the dikes, called levees, in central New Orleans had already collapsed. Soon many more New Orleans levees fail or are overtopped by the Hurricane's 9-foot storm surge. As a result, 80 percent of New Orleans, Louisiana's largest city, with a population of 450,000, is flooded. Katrina kills more than 1800 people, making it the deadliest North American hurricane since 1928. A large portion of the death toll is caused by failure of the flood-control systems built and maintained by the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers. To make matters worse, the negligence of the emergency response was bad enough to force the resignations of the heads of both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the New Orleans Police Department. Today, Katrina marks a tipping point for environmental catastrophes. In the 18 years following the Katrina disaster, at least 4600 people in the U.S. and its possessions have died as a result of major weather-related disasters. During the 18 years before Katrina, the comparable number was 2530. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1332683/
August 30, 1923 (100 years ago). In Perth Amboy NJ, less than a mile from Staten Island, NY, some six thousand people attack a Ku Klux Klan meeting in the Odd Fellows Hall, totally routing the KKK, despite attempts by police and firefighters to stop them. https://books.google.com/books?id=T5d2CQAAQBAJ&pg=PT68&lpg=PT68&dq=pert…
August 31, 1973 (50 years ago). The month-long trial of the Gainesville Eight, who are accused of conspiracy to violently disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention, ends when the jury needs less than four hours to find all the defendants not guilty. The case against the defendants, seven of whom were members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, depended heavily on the testimony of five paid FBI informers who had infiltrated the veterans' organization. After the informers' credibility was badly undermined during cross-examination, the verdict was no surprise, except, perhaps, to the FBI and the prosecutors. https://truthout.org/articles/the-gainesville-eight-and-a-nixonized-wor…
September 1, 1878 (145 years ago). In Boston, Emma Nutt starts to work as a telephone operator. It is an important event because she is the first woman telephone operator in the U.S. Before Nutt is hired, all telephone operators are men (or tall boys). But there are very few of them at the time, because the first telephone company is a little more than a year old. Men (and boys) had been hired as operators because almost all of the many thousands of telegraph operators were male. But men did not make good telephone operators, because the job required them to have a conversation with every telephone user. The user would signal the telephone company that he or she wanted to make a call, a telephone operator would come on the line and ask for the number to be called. It was quickly discovered that men had a tendency to be impatient or rude to the customers. Emma Nutt, who was 18 at the time, with a soothing voice and excellent manners, was an immediate success. Very soon her employer began to replace male operators with women (and tall girls). Not only were female operators more polite, but they could be paid as little as 25 percent of the hourly wage paid to male operators. Within a decade of Emma Nutt's hiring, virtually all telephone operators in the U.S. were female. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator
September 2, 1963 (60 years ago). CBS Evening News doubles the length of its weeknight news program, going to 30 minutes. It is the first of the networks to do so. https://history.capitolbroadcasting.com/media-assets/first-broadcast-of…
September 3, 1838 (185 years ago). Frederick Douglass, who is about 21 years old, escapes his slave master in Baltimore. Travelling by train and by boat, and carrying papers showing he is not enslaved, he manages to reach Manhattan in less than 24 hours. You can read about his remarkable life here: https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/september-03#frederick-dougla…
September 4, 1838 (185 years ago and a day after Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery). In what is known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death, one of many, many, similar episodes of ethnic cleansing, 859 Potawatomi Nation members are forced to begin a 660-mile trek from northern Indiana to eastern Kansas. During the journey, which requires two months to complete, more than five percent of the deportees die. The expulsion of the Potawatomi Nation was conducted under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which resulted in forcing at least 50,000 Native Americans to relocate to the west of the Mississippi River. http://www.potawatomi-tda.org/
