The Beatles came together for their final live performance on this
day in history, August 29, 1966.

The concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco was never
announced as the band’s last dance, but there was plenty of
speculation that the boys were looking to call it quits, according
to The Beatles Bible.

Although the Fab Four made a surprise appearance on the rooftop
of the Apple building in London on Jan. 30, 1969, Ringo Starr wrote
in an anthology that it was clear the Candlestick Park performance
would be the band’s official finale.

They were the most successful American pop group of the 1960s—
a group whose 12 #1 hits in the first full decade of the rock and roll
era places them behind only Elvis and the Beatles in terms of chart dominance. They helped define the very sound of the 60s, but like
fellow icons the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, they came apart
in the first year of the 70s. The curtain closed for good on Diana
Ross and the Supremes on January 14, 1970, at the Frontier Hotel
in Las Vegas, Nevada.

CAMILLE BOHANNON

Actor Harrison Ford is 79 today.

A security guard and an unidentified man check out an area where
several people were killed as they were caught in a surging crowd. 

The general-admission ticketing policy for rock concerts at Cincinnati’s
Riverfront Coliseum in the 1970s was known as “festival seating.” That
term and that ticketing policy would become infamous in the wake of one
of the deadliest rock-concert incidents in history. Eleven people, including
three high-school students, were killed on December 3, 1979, when a crowd
of general-admission ticket-holders to a Cincinnati Who concert surged
forward in an attempt to enter Riverfront Coliseum and secure prime
unreserved seats inside.

Festival seating had already been eliminated at many similar venues in the
United States by 1979, yet the system remained in place at Riverfront
Coliseum despite a dangerous incident at a Led Zeppelin show two years
earlier. That day, 60 would-be concertgoers were arrested, and dozens
more injured, when the crowd outside the venue surged up against the
Coliseum’s locked glass doors.

Cincinnati police officers help people crushed during a stampede at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati.

CARLATA BRADLEY

Jefferson Davis died in New Orleans on this day in 1889. He was
the first and only president of the Confederate States of America
and the highest ranking confederate leader of the South.

On this day in 1957, America’s first attempt at putting a satellite into
orbit failed when the Vanguard TV-3 launch vehicle lost thrust after
lift-off and exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, FL. The
launch was in response to the Soviet Union’s orbiting of Sputnik l.