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Sacco and Vanzetti arrested for armed robbery and murder
Sacco and Vanzetti were charged with committing robbery and murder at the Slater and Morrill shoe factory in South Braintree. On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, payroll clerk Frederick Parmenter and security guard Alessandro Berardelli were shot to death and robbed of over $15,000 in cash. -
KDKA goes on the air from Pittsburgh
First commercial radio station was KDKA in Pittsburgh, which went on the air in the evening of Nov. 2, 1920, with a broadcast of the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election. Frank Conrad was the engineer who put KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the United States, on the air. -
1st Miss American Pageant
Sixteen year-old Margaret Gorman from Washington, DC (at far left in white hat) won the first competition. The 1921 Atlantic City Pageant was designed to encourage visitors to stay in the resort past Labor Day, the traditional end of the season. -
Teapot Dome Scandal
It centered on Interior Secretary Albert Bacon Fall, who had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, as well as two locations in California, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. The leases were the subject of an investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. -
1st Winter Olympics Held
The first Winter Games were held in Chamonix (France), in 1924. Initially called the “International Winter Sports Week”, this event was renamed the “1st Olympic Winter Games” only in 1926 at the IOC Session in Lisbon. -
The Great Gatsby published by F. Scott Fitzgerald
On March 19, 1925, Fitzgerald expressed enthusiasm for the title Under the Red, White, and Blue, but it was too late to change it at that stage. The novel was published as The Great Gatsby on April 10, 1925. -
Scopes Monkey Trial
The Scopes “monkey trial” was the moniker journalist H. L. Mencken applied to the 1925 prosecution of a criminal action brought by the state of Tennessee against high school teacher John T. Scopes for violating the state's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools. -
Charles Lindberg completes solo flight across the Atlantic
On May 20–21, 1927, he made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris, a distance of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), flying alone for 33.5 hours. His aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, was built to compete for the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first flight between the two cities. -
The Jazz Singer debuts (1st movie with sound)
The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American part-talkie musical drama film directed by Alan Crosland and produced by Warner Bros. Pictures. It is the first feature-length motion picture with both synchronized recorded music and lip-synchronous singing and speech (in several isolated sequences). -
St. Valentine's Day Massacre
At 10:30 in the morning on Saint Valentine's Day, Thursday, February 14, 1929, seven men were murdered at the garage at 2122 North Clark Street, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side. They were shot by four men using weapons that included two Thompson submachine guns. -
Black Tuesday (Stock Market Crash)
On October 29, 1929, "Black Tuesday" hit Wall Street as investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Around $14 billion of stock value was lost, wiping out thousands of investors. The panic selling reached its peak with some stocks having no buyers at any price.