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19591776 Club

The Continental League is born at the Biltmore: baseball's third major

Branch Rickey signs on as president of a league that will never play a single game.

Two years after the Giants and Dodgers fled for California, New York still had no National League team, and Mayor Robert Wagner's committee to bring one back had gone nowhere. On July 27, 1959, attorney William Shea unveiled the Continental League at the Biltmore Hotel, with teams planned for New York, Toronto, Denver, Houston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Colorado senator Edwin C. Johnson supplied the name. Branch Rickey, baseball's most famous executive, was named league president on August 18, 1959, about three weeks later. Its backers hoped the threat of a rival league would force organized baseball to expand rather than actually compete against it…

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More from July 27
1953

Armistice ends the fighting in Korea; the peace that follows is only a truce

Two years of talks end in a tent at Panmunjom, but South Korea's own president will not put his name on it.
1789

Washington signs the first agency of the new government into law

A department to handle foreign affairs becomes the executive branch's opening act under the Constitution.
1974

Judiciary Committee votes 27 to 11: Nixon obstructed justice

Six Republicans join every Democrat on the panel, three days after the Supreme Court ordered the tapes handed over.
16631776 Club
Foreign ships lose the colonial trade, and Dutch merchants lose the most.
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Read the full July 27 edition →Everything that happened on July 27 →
More from Cold War America
1952

U.S. detonates Ivy Mike at Enewetak; Elugelab Island is gone

The 7:15 a.m. shot, fired just before a presidential election, yields 10.4 megatons from a device more than twenty feet tall.
1983

Reagan signs the King holiday bill, fifteen years after the first one was introduced

Congress passed it by wide margins, but the President had once dismissed the push behind it as "an image, not reality."
1988

A Cornell graduate student's program slips onto the Internet from a computer at MIT

Robert Tappan Morris, 23, launches it at about 8:30 p.m. from another campus so it won't trace back to Cornell; the network holds roughly 60,000 machines.
1948

The Tribune's early edition crowns Dewey; the returns say otherwise

A printers' strike pushed the press deadline hours earlier, and about 150,000 copies roll before the count turns.
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