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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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More from Cold War America
1958

1,145 cadets trade Lowry's barracks for a half-built campus in Colorado Springs

Some buildings still lack finishing touches, but the Air Force Academy finally has a permanent home.
1983

Challenger lights up the pre-dawn sky on the shuttle program's first night launch

Guion Bluford rides along, becoming the first African American to fly in space.
1974

An SR-71 crosses the Atlantic in under two hours flat

Sullivan and Widdifield average nearly 1,807 miles an hour, refueling in midair along the way.
1983

Soviet jet destroys Korean Air 007 off Sakhalin; 269 dead, a US congressman among them

The Boeing 747 had drifted deep into Soviet airspace before a Su-15 pilot fired his missiles.
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