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Brookline Amateur Wins U.S. Open
Brookline Amateur Wins U.S. Open
On this day in 1913, at The Country Club in Brookline, 20-year-old Francis Ouimet became the first amateur to win the U.S. Open Golf Tournament. Growing up in an immigrant family across the street from...
First Newspaper Published in the Colonies
First Newspaper Published in the Colonies
On this day in 1690, Boston printer Benjamin Harris produced the first issue of Publick Occurrences, the first newspaper published in Britain's North American colonies. Readers were enthusiastic, but the governor was not. Under British...
Maria Mitchell Discovers Comet
Maria Mitchell Discovers Comet
On this day in 1847, 29-year-old Maria Mitchell stood on the roof of her parent's Nantucket home, focusing her telescope on what she believed to be a faraway star. Suddenly she realized that the blurry...
Shoppers' World Launches Mall Era
Shoppers' World Launches Mall Era
On this day in 1951, Shoppers' World in Framingham opened for business. The first suburban shopping mall in the Northeast, and only the second in the country, the complex was a revolutionary design. Anchored by...
Balloonist Takes First Aerial Photograph
Balloonist Takes First Aerial Photograph
On this day in 1860, Boston newspapers carried an advertisement for an extraordinary event: photographer James Wallace Black would photograph Boston from a hot-air balloon hovering over the city. Black accomplished this well-publicized feat five...
Roger Williams Banished
Roger Williams Banished
On this day in 1635, Puritan minister Roger Williams was found guilty of spreading "newe & dangerous opinions" and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Before leaving England in 1630, Williams had seen heretics whipped,...
Boston Doctors Use First Iron Lung
Boston Doctors Use First Iron Lung
On this day in 1928, Children's Hospital in Boston was the scene of the first use of an "iron lung." Developed by a young Harvard doctor, it was little more than a galvanized iron box,...
Margaret Marshall Appointed to Supreme Judicial Court
Margaret Marshall Appointed to Supreme Judicial Court
On this day in 1999, Margaret Marshall became the first woman appointed Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The oldest court in the Western Hemisphere, the SJC was established in 1693 in the...
Boston Dentist Demonstrates Ether
Boston Dentist Demonstrates Ether
On this day in 1846, a crowd gathered in the operating theater at Massachusetts General Hospital. A Boston printer with a tumor on his jaw lay on the table. Curious and skeptical physicians and...
First Missionaries Leave for Hawaii
First Missionaries Leave for Hawaii
On this day in 1819, a crowd gathered on a Boston wharf to bid farewell to the first Protestant missionaries bound for Hawaii. Among them were seven Massachusetts couples, four of them recently married. After...