Discover What Happened Today in History
The first session of the United States Congress convened under the new Constitution in Federal Hall in New York City. This marked the beginning of the federal government as defined by the Constitution, with the inauguration of President George Washington following a month later.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States, famously declaring 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.' This event occurred at the height of the Great Depression and initiated his transformative New Deal policies.
The first known case of the 1918 influenza pandemic, often called the 'Spanish Flu,' was reported at Camp Funston, Kansas. This devastating global pandemic would eventually infect about one-third of the world's population and kill an estimated 50 million people.
The first production model of the Cray-1 supercomputer was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Designed by Seymour Cray, it was the fastest computer in the world for several years and became an icon of high-performance computing.
Ernest Hemingway announced the completion of his novella 'The Old Man and the Sea' on this date. The book was published later that year to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and contributing to his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.