Wednesday · November 11, 2026
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American history, reported as it happened
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19481776 Club

New York's answer to LaGuardia takes flight; first commercial plane lifts off from Idlewild

Truman and Dewey share the ribbon at a 1,000-acre airport carved from Jamaica Bay marshland and a former golf course.

LaGuardia Field had been overwhelmed since the day it opened in 1939, and New York needed a bigger answer. On July 1, 1948, the first commercial flight departed New York International Airport — built on 1,000 acres of former marshland and the old Idlewild Golf Course along Jamaica Bay — with President Harry S. Truman and Governor Thomas E. Dewey both on hand for the opening ceremony. Within six years, more international passengers moved through Idlewild than through any other airport on earth…

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More from July 1
1863

Hill's men march on Gettysburg for supplies; Buford's cavalry is waiting on the ridges

Trading ridge for ridge all morning, Union troopers hold long enough for infantry to arrive; Hancock picks Cemetery Hill as the ground to stand on.
1946

Blandy detonates the bomb over Bikini; the target fleet survives, and the Navy claims vindication

Test Able misses its aim point by 2,130 feet, scattering results that disappoint the Navy's critics but settle nothing about the weapon's power at sea.
1898

Roosevelt and the Buffalo Soldiers take Kettle Hill; San Juan Heights fall to the Fifth Corps

Outnumbered 16-to-1, Spanish defenders under Linares y Pombo inflict punishing losses before the heights are carried and the road to Santiago opens.
19631776 Club
The Zone Improvement Plan assigns a unique ZIP code to each address nationwide, with the first digit narrowing a region and each that follows pointing closer to a single post office.
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More from Cold War America
1958

Pan Am's jet lands at Le Bourget; New York to Paris in six hours of air time

A refueling stop in Gander was the only thing slowing the Clipper America down.
1962

One officer says no, and a Soviet sub's nuclear torpedo stays in its tube

Depth-charged and nearly out of air near Cuba, B-59's crew thought the war had already started.
1962

Khrushchev agreed to pull the missiles out of Cuba

Thirteen days after U-2 photographs found the sites, the Soviet premier backs down and the world exhales.
1965

Crews set the last piece, and the Gateway Arch finally closes at 630 feet

A nine-ton triangle of steel bridges the gap between two legs that had been rising toward each other for two years.
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