Thieves slipped into the Museum of Natural History in New York on this day in 1964 and lifted an extraordinary haul of gems, among them the 565-carat Star of India, the largest sapphire in the world, and the 100-carat DeLong Ruby.
The brazen theft stunned collectors and investigators alike, yet within weeks the culprits were tracked down and most of the stolen jewels, including the Star of India, were recovered.
President Woodrow Wilson vetoed it, warning that banning alcohol while rationing wartime grain made no sense now the war was over. Congress disagreed, and on this day in 1919 the Senate and House of Representatives overrode his veto, pushing the Volstead Act into law and setting a date to enforce the newly ratified Eighteenth Amendment.
The Act gave Prohibition its teeth: it defined any drink over 0.5 percent alcohol as illegal and handed federal agents the power to raid, seize and prosecute. Within months, that vacuum would be filled not by sobriety but by bootleggers, speakeasies and the organised crime syndicates who built fortunes smuggling what the law had just made forbidden.
Paul Avery had spent months covering the unidentified killer terrorising Northern California for the San Francisco Chronicle, turning his byline into the public face of the investigation. That attention made him a target of the very man he was writing about.
On 27 October 1970, the Zodiac Killer sent a letter addressed directly to Avery, taunting the journalist for the coverage that had made his name synonymous with the case. The killer was never identified, and the letter remains one of the eeriest pieces of correspondence in a case still unsolved more than half a century later.
The feud between the Earp brothers and the Clanton-McLaury outfit had been building for months over cattle rustling, stagecoach robberies and bad blood on the streets of Tombstone, Arizona Territory. It ended in a vacant lot behind the O.K. Corral on this day in 1881, when Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp, backed by the gambler and gunfighter Doc Holliday, walked down to disarm a group of armed men they accused of flouting the town’s gun ban.
What followed lasted less than thirty seconds. Around thirty shots were fired at close range, leaving Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton dead in the dirt. Virgil and Morgan Earp were both wounded but survived, and the shootout became the most mythologised gun battle of the American West, replayed in films and folklore ever since.
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